5 ms·

You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1]. I tried it and it's impressive. [1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations/claude_code https:/

by ammar_x 5mo ago

You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1]. I tried it and it's impressive. [1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations/claude_code https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

Scarbutt 5mo ago
Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.
- cortesoft 5mo ago
  At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it. Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
- wolttam 5mo ago
  The value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.
  - koolba 5mo ago
    Good or better? Curious which would be in either bucket.
    - wolttam 5mo ago
      Probably a matter of taste. I prefer the harness I wrote, I don't want to go near Anthropic's bloated mess of a harness with a 10-meter pole.
  - chandureddyvari 5mo ago
    What’s your favourite harness? Is there any benchmarks for harness like LLMs have for swe verified?
    - wolttam 5mo ago
      You can check my profile for which one I like most :) I do think there have been efforts to benchmark different harnesses. Personally I'm not going to choose one harness or another based on +/- a few percentage points in a benchmark. I'm going to use one the one that I find the most ergonomic, that isn't too bloated, etc. The models are the primary lever, not the harness.
    - Mkengin 4mo ago
      There Seen to be more and more harness benchmarks out there, pretty interesting read: https://neuralnoise.com/2026/harness-bench-wip/ https://neuralnoise.com/2026/harness-bench-wip/
  - crooked-v 5mo ago
    And it gets dragged down by Anthropic actively injecting unhelpful things into prompts without telling users about them (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262).
  - rane 5mo ago
    I thought so, and then I tried Opencode and Codex and started to appreciate Claude Code a lot more. They've actually done great work with the small details.
    - intuxikated 5mo ago
      I actually have't looked back since trying opencode The ability to properly see what the agent is doing in tool calls and subagents is really unmatched, CC strips all reasoning and return values, only displaying tool calls, and you're unable to expand a single subagent, it's expand everything and scroll endlessly or show everything collapsed with basically no info at all (read x files, ran x commands) Just seems like extremely basic features are missing
- HWR_14 5mo ago
  It went the other way, you can't use other harnesses to connect to the cheaper versions of Claude. So clearly they think their current moat is Claude Code use, not the LLM itself.
- odiroot 5mo ago
  IMHO the ergonomics of their tooling are not great. I'd rather use Codex or even OpenCode. Configuration alone is very arcane with lacking documentation. Sandboxing/permission system is quite confusing too.
thisisit 5mo ago
I am curious - Is there a way to switch between models depending on the task? Because I believe Deepseek V4 is not multimodal and it will be good to switch back to Claude if vision or other capabilities are required.
- mewse-hn 5mo ago
  I was looking into something similar because I wanted to test a local model for doing basic coding and smart model (deepseek) for planning. It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available. HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.
  - thisisit 5mo ago
    Found this: https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch It allows for switching models in Claude Code.
    - mewse-hn 5mo ago
      Right that says it has a proxy feature so it can probably do what I was describing with LiteLLM
  - mvanbaak 5mo ago
    Check out the project called superpowers. It can use different models for different agents. I use it witb opencode to have different models for reaearch, planning, execution, testing etc
- maxdo 5mo ago
  i've been trying that, in reality every time you try to save it, it's not worth it, the cost of mistake is so high , you can spent 2-3h on just wrong assumption, you lost your time and all the burned tokens.
wiradikusuma 5mo ago
That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around. Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)
- wrs 5mo ago
  The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- flexagoon 5mo ago
  AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#toc_10 https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)
  - rjh29 5mo ago
    Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.
    - flexagoon 5mo ago
      Oh damn, I haven't noticed because my browser removes the referer header. But I think the image on the block page is a pretty good answer to why he did that.
KronisLV 5mo ago
I'm working on a custom launcher for hooking up Claude Code with various providers (groups env variables in profiles) cause DeepSeek doesn't have vision and sometimes I need browser use with screenshots or Opus reasoning, for other tasks it's fine: https://ccode.kronis.dev/ https://ccode.kronis.dev/ # After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode) ccode init-config ccode edit-config # Run with default profile ccode # Run with named profile ccode --deepseek # Set default profile ccode set-default-profile deepseek Also turns out that with a local proxy you can get Remote Control working and see the DeepSeek sessions in the desktop app, screenshots on the page. Other than that, I'm happy that it works pretty well and the discount is enough to make me consider going from Anthropic's Max subscription to Pro and using it only where DeepSeek is insufficient. With that proxy I eventually hope to be able to transparently switch models mid-task, if I need Opus for like 5 turns or something. Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/ https://opencode.ai/docs/web/
rjh29 5mo ago
How does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers? I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  It is still more expensive per-request than the common Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions, but the math changes a lot based on your specific use case. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/main/subscription_vs_api_comparison.csv https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/... But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.
  - iammrpayments 5mo ago
    I don’t even use Claude that much and was hitting limits in the 20$ using sonnet, I’ve deposited 5$ with deepseek and haven’t hit the limit after spending 60million+ tokens. So no way it’s more expensive.
  - nchmy 4mo ago
    The link you shared is just a large table of data, which is hard to browse on a phone. Could you please elaborate on the far cheaper subscriptions that we should be using?
- stavros 5mo ago
  I've been using it pretty extensively over a month and I'm at maybe $7. It thinks for quite a while, but the results have been better than Sonnet for me.
maxdo 5mo ago
I'm not curious what tasks you tested it for. Im working on coding agent writing code dynamically on request for customers. i'd say code itself very simple and aggressively cached, and patternalized, e.g. we adding lots of hints to the system. the only real family models that work were claude and openai, surprisingly, for tasks that needs faster speed, gpt 5.4 is very impressive. Deep seek was very average , doing things somewhere in gemini flash 3.0 domain.
hbarka 5mo ago
The npm install of Claude Code deprecated, since Feb 2026.
BiraIgnacio 5mo ago
I've been using V4 flash consistently with Claude. Pretty great fast and darn cheap. I use it about 3h/day and so far haven't crossed $1 USD/week. FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json "env": { "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real", "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic", "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1", "CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL": "low", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": "1", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_THINKING": "0", "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_AWAY_SUMMARY": "0", "CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "8000", "CLAUDE_CODE_FILE_READ_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "4000", "BASH_MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH": "20000", "CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE": "60", "CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW": "200000", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS": "1" }
- HawtAds 5mo ago
  Why not use higher thinking effort?
  - BiraIgnacio 4mo ago
    Just cause that level seems to be working fine for me and it's usually faster.
- ed_mercer 5mo ago
  Hi, is it comparable to Opus?
  - chewz 5mo ago
    V4 Pro is between Sonnet and Opus. But it is cheap. Slow but very cheap. Very diligent. I run a proxy that allows me switching back to Opus when necessary. Deepseek isn't like Z.ai which is bit cheaper only on the surface. Or like Qwen 3.7 Max which is Opus-level but very expensive. Deepseek is my favorite since V3 but V4 is definitely catch-up to newer Anthropic models
firecall 5mo ago
It seems you can use the Claude Code CLI harness without a Claude Pro subscription now, which I don't think you could a before? I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.
jdasdf 4mo ago
I'm my experience claude code is kind of shit. Pi works very well with deepseek though

by ammar_x 5mo ago

Scarbutt 5mo ago

Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.

cortesoft 5mo ago
At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it. Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
wolttam 5mo ago
The value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.
- koolba 5mo ago
  Good or better? Curious which would be in either bucket.
  - wolttam 5mo ago
    Probably a matter of taste. I prefer the harness I wrote, I don't want to go near Anthropic's bloated mess of a harness with a 10-meter pole.
- chandureddyvari 5mo ago
  What’s your favourite harness? Is there any benchmarks for harness like LLMs have for swe verified?
  - wolttam 5mo ago
    You can check my profile for which one I like most :) I do think there have been efforts to benchmark different harnesses. Personally I'm not going to choose one harness or another based on +/- a few percentage points in a benchmark. I'm going to use one the one that I find the most ergonomic, that isn't too bloated, etc. The models are the primary lever, not the harness.
  - Mkengin 4mo ago
    There Seen to be more and more harness benchmarks out there, pretty interesting read: https://neuralnoise.com/2026/harness-bench-wip/ https://neuralnoise.com/2026/harness-bench-wip/
- crooked-v 5mo ago
  And it gets dragged down by Anthropic actively injecting unhelpful things into prompts without telling users about them (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262).
- rane 5mo ago
  I thought so, and then I tried Opencode and Codex and started to appreciate Claude Code a lot more. They've actually done great work with the small details.
  - intuxikated 5mo ago
    I actually have't looked back since trying opencode The ability to properly see what the agent is doing in tool calls and subagents is really unmatched, CC strips all reasoning and return values, only displaying tool calls, and you're unable to expand a single subagent, it's expand everything and scroll endlessly or show everything collapsed with basically no info at all (read x files, ran x commands) Just seems like extremely basic features are missing
HWR_14 5mo ago
It went the other way, you can't use other harnesses to connect to the cheaper versions of Claude. So clearly they think their current moat is Claude Code use, not the LLM itself.
odiroot 5mo ago
IMHO the ergonomics of their tooling are not great. I'd rather use Codex or even OpenCode. Configuration alone is very arcane with lacking documentation. Sandboxing/permission system is quite confusing too.

thisisit 5mo ago

I am curious - Is there a way to switch between models depending on the task? Because I believe Deepseek V4 is not multimodal and it will be good to switch back to Claude if vision or other capabilities are required.

mewse-hn 5mo ago
I was looking into something similar because I wanted to test a local model for doing basic coding and smart model (deepseek) for planning. It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available. HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.
- thisisit 5mo ago
  Found this: https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch It allows for switching models in Claude Code.
  - mewse-hn 5mo ago
    Right that says it has a proxy feature so it can probably do what I was describing with LiteLLM
- mvanbaak 5mo ago
  Check out the project called superpowers. It can use different models for different agents. I use it witb opencode to have different models for reaearch, planning, execution, testing etc
maxdo 5mo ago
i've been trying that, in reality every time you try to save it, it's not worth it, the cost of mistake is so high , you can spent 2-3h on just wrong assumption, you lost your time and all the burned tokens.

wiradikusuma 5mo ago

That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around. Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)

wrs 5mo ago
The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
flexagoon 5mo ago
AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#toc_10 https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)
- rjh29 5mo ago
  Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.
  - flexagoon 5mo ago
    Oh damn, I haven't noticed because my browser removes the referer header. But I think the image on the block page is a pretty good answer to why he did that.

KronisLV 5mo ago

I'm working on a custom launcher for hooking up Claude Code with various providers (groups env variables in profiles) cause DeepSeek doesn't have vision and sometimes I need browser use with screenshots or Opus reasoning, for other tasks it's fine: https://ccode.kronis.dev/ https://ccode.kronis.dev/ # After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode) ccode init-config ccode edit-config # Run with default profile ccode # Run with named profile ccode --deepseek # Set default profile ccode set-default-profile deepseek Also turns out that with a local proxy you can get Remote Control working and see the DeepSeek sessions in the desktop app, screenshots on the page. Other than that, I'm happy that it works pretty well and the discount is enough to make me consider going from Anthropic's Max subscription to Pro and using it only where DeepSeek is insufficient. With that proxy I eventually hope to be able to transparently switch models mid-task, if I need Opus for like 5 turns or something. Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/ https://opencode.ai/docs/web/

rjh29 5mo ago

How does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers? I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.

0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
It is still more expensive per-request than the common Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions, but the math changes a lot based on your specific use case. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/main/subscription_vs_api_comparison.csv https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/... But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.
- iammrpayments 5mo ago
  I don’t even use Claude that much and was hitting limits in the 20$ using sonnet, I’ve deposited 5$ with deepseek and haven’t hit the limit after spending 60million+ tokens. So no way it’s more expensive.
- nchmy 4mo ago
  The link you shared is just a large table of data, which is hard to browse on a phone. Could you please elaborate on the far cheaper subscriptions that we should be using?
stavros 5mo ago
I've been using it pretty extensively over a month and I'm at maybe $7. It thinks for quite a while, but the results have been better than Sonnet for me.

maxdo 5mo ago

I'm not curious what tasks you tested it for. Im working on coding agent writing code dynamically on request for customers. i'd say code itself very simple and aggressively cached, and patternalized, e.g. we adding lots of hints to the system. the only real family models that work were claude and openai, surprisingly, for tasks that needs faster speed, gpt 5.4 is very impressive. Deep seek was very average , doing things somewhere in gemini flash 3.0 domain.

hbarka 5mo ago

The npm install of Claude Code deprecated, since Feb 2026.

BiraIgnacio 5mo ago

I've been using V4 flash consistently with Claude. Pretty great fast and darn cheap. I use it about 3h/day and so far haven't crossed $1 USD/week. FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json "env": { "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real", "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic", "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1", "CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL": "low", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": "1", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_THINKING": "0", "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_AWAY_SUMMARY": "0", "CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash", "CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "8000", "CLAUDE_CODE_FILE_READ_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "4000", "BASH_MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH": "20000", "CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE": "60", "CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW": "200000", "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS": "1" }

HawtAds 5mo ago
Why not use higher thinking effort?
- BiraIgnacio 4mo ago
  Just cause that level seems to be working fine for me and it's usually faster.
ed_mercer 5mo ago
Hi, is it comparable to Opus?
- chewz 5mo ago
  V4 Pro is between Sonnet and Opus. But it is cheap. Slow but very cheap. Very diligent. I run a proxy that allows me switching back to Opus when necessary. Deepseek isn't like Z.ai which is bit cheaper only on the surface. Or like Qwen 3.7 Max which is Opus-level but very expensive. Deepseek is my favorite since V3 but V4 is definitely catch-up to newer Anthropic models

firecall 5mo ago

It seems you can use the Claude Code CLI harness without a Claude Pro subscription now, which I don't think you could a before? I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.

jdasdf 4mo ago

I'm my experience claude code is kind of shit. Pi works very well with deepseek though