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I use DeepSeek every day (via VSCode Insiders and Zed Editor). It's very affordable and, while it's slightly behind Claude (not sure how far behind Fable), it s
by apatheticonion 4mo ago
I use DeepSeek every day (via VSCode Insiders and Zed Editor). It's very affordable and, while it's slightly behind Claude (not sure how far behind Fable), it suits my working style well. I'm not using unsupervised multi-agent workflows and don't need a library of skills files - I'm writing most of the code and leaning on AI to help with mundane tasks - like;
- generating types for APIs
- generating boilerplate based on existing code
- improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that)
- Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries
- Creating implementations against hand written tests
- Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries
- Writing documentation
I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens.
It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before.
As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available.
- cg5280 4mo agoI second this. I’ve been using it a lot (with OpenCode) for personal projects. It’s intelligent enough at a tiny fraction of the cost of Claude or Codex.
- proxysna 4mo agoI've been using deepseek for some development at home and it is really good for the price. It is at the point where i am ok with using it as a tool that i can rely on and not an expensive gadget with flaky uptimes.
- globalnode 4mo agoUsing laws to ban competitors is just economic warfare thats all. Its got nothing to do with "national security", thats just the reason they give us normies. You should be safe in Australia since they actually need to be friends with China.
- p-e-w 4mo agoWhat? Every country has the right to freely decide which companies are permitted to operate under its jurisdiction, and exercising that right isn’t “warfare” of any kind.
- inigyou 4mo agoWhat do you think warfare is?
- hsuduebc2 4mo agoPoeple talking about 'trade war' must drive you crazy.
- LtWorf 4mo agoI think the country that talks the most how the market regulates itself and needs no state intervention isn't the most qualified to put tariffs and block other countries from trade. And yet here we are…
- kingforaday 4mo ago> You should be safe in Australia since they actually need to be friends with China. As a non-Australian, I enjoyed very much reading about Australia in a book by Tim Marshall titled "The Power of Geography". I didn't quite realize just how vulnerable they become with China's ambitions and expanse in the South Pacific due to their reliance on vital sea lanes for trade with its Asian partners. After reading that book, I can appreciate your comment much more.
- incompatible 4mo agoLike some wag said recently, Australia needs nuclear submarines to protect its vital trade with China against China.
- re-thc 4mo ago> Using laws to ban competitors is just economic warfare thats all. Its got nothing to do with "national security" Economic safety is 1 angle of national security. They're not "wrong".
- fraXis 4mo agoHow are you accessing their API? Through OpenRouter, or direct? Are you using DeepSeek v4 Pro? $2 seems a lot cheaper than my own experience accessing them through OpenRouter for over 100 million tokens, but I am using OpenRouter to access v4 pro.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoPro is substantially more expensive than flash. In addition, there's wide variance in price with DeepSeek themselves providing the cheapest tokens last I checked (but they train on them). Caching policy also varies by provider. TTL can be as low as 5 minutes or as high as 24 hours and reading from the cache might or might not reset the timer. Whether or not you get a hit makes (IIRC) a 10x (edit: it's actually 50x) price difference in the case of DeepSeek themselves.
- apatheticonion 4mo agoI am using Flash and accessing the API directly via vscode insiders and occasionally Zed (it's buggy but I keep coming back to it because I want it to succeed). Unless you need enterprise multi-model management, I don't see the point in OpenRouter as it just adds cost overhead and you can just self-host an open router alternative (LiteLLM, Bifrost, etc). Running an LLM gateway locally is kind of nice as it allows you to normalize your configurations against your internal gateway - but I haven't really needed to.
- Bnjoroge 4mo agoYou can BYOK with openrouter and pay nothing up until 1mil requests/month iirc which is pretty generous for one person
- crazylogger 4mo agoCache hit rate dominates your total cost calculation for long agent session, and it largely depends on the provider. Deepseek's native deployment is probably much better than third party in this regard. For v4 pro it's a whopping >100x price difference between normal input vs. cached input tokens.
- 4mo ago
- godelski 4mo ago> As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data I'm not sure I understand this. I'm not defending the US, but isn't your data being in more hands worse? Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China? Them being more allied with the US and all? Not to mention the whole nuclear sub issue. Having data stolen is shitty either way but isn't data taken by an adversarial country a worse situation?
- stephen_g 4mo agoMost Aussies aren't really worried about China... China remains our largest trading partner, and polling shows less than half of Australians think the AUKUS alliance (which includes the nuclear subs) makes our region safer.
- est 4mo ago> isn't your data being in more hands worse? > Having data stolen is shitty Fun fact: Deepseek can be hosted by third parties even yourself.
- florkbork 4mo agoRe Australia vs China https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=JgnhenF0qeTZXeGS https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=JgnhenF0qeTZXeGS basically explains the situation. While having data/code stolen isn't ideal, there is a certain point where you need to assume it's already out there. There's actually more probability of harm from shady US companies imo, because people are less suspicious about data sovereignty
- l33tman 4mo agoWhen you paste youtube (or instagram) links, it's good practice to remove the doxxing share link identifiers (?si and everything past it)
- technion 4mo agoAs an Australian.. politically I need to worry about business data touching China. It will come up at a Risk Advisory Committee meeting as a serious issue. In actual personal practice, no. China having my data presents no actual impact to me, America will do things that impact me.
- hodgehog11 4mo agoIn terms of price-to-productivity, nothing will beat DeepSeek right now. For what you have described, all of the existing frontier models will perform well (probably about the same even). If you expanded the list to very hard research tasks, Fable was so far ahead of the others that it doesn't even deserve debate. If you are a researcher doing something involving scientific computation or mathematics that wasn't rejected by the guard rails, and you were using Fable, that week was probably your most productive week ever. A couple of my PhD students effectively finished their current projects in that period by getting Fable to chew on it for 30 hours straight (not sure how I feel about that).
- Cakez0r 4mo agoMimo 2.5 pro is the best intelligence / dollar
- theanonymousone 4mo agoYes. Whenever I tried, I found no reason to use DeepSeek v4 Pro versus MiMo v2.5 Pro, price-wise or performance-wise. Benchmarks also confirm this.
- atty 4mo agoIn most cases it seems (at least to me and colleagues) to be turning out that picking best intelligence is a better option than picking better intelligence / dollar, assuming you can afford the cost. At least on interesting problems. If you’re doing generic web dev work, probably not the case.
- hodgehog11 4mo agoAbsolutely agree with this. As Louis Rossmann recently pointed out, it's the difference between a correct answer and a wrong answer; the correct answer is worth a good amount, while the wrong answer is worth nothing. Under this metric, for harder tasks, the most intelligent model is best per dollar.
- 4mo ago
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- Rover222 4mo agoDevelopers claiming their valuable data was “stolen” to train models is so dramatic.
- apatheticonion 4mo agoI'd be fine if it cut both ways. It shouldn't be legal for works distributed by people under licenses that would prohibit derivative work whilst if I reverse engineered a Nintendo Switch 2 with an LLM I'd be sent to the underworld.
- allarm 4mo agoCompanies that claim downloading their shit is theft are so dramatic. Although the consequences are different. Your "argument" is immature.
- grafmax 4mo agoIMO US vs Chinese data vacuuming is a false choice. One of the main benefits of these open weights models is that you can get the privacy and cost savings by hosting your own model in cloud infrastructure. Open weights models are only 4.5 months behind closed weight ones. The fact that US considers propping its flagship technology by blacklisting competitors demonstrates how small the US competitive advantage really is.
- neuroelectron 4mo agoThe USA has an entire economic system to financialize your personal data and obfuscate your privacy. China can just sniff on their citizens API Calls, and use that to distill models.
- bjackman 4mo agoHosting DeepSeek Pro yourself is gonna be wildly expensive though? You have a wide choice of providers available, so if you can find one you trust you can get inference without data harvesting and it's still very cheap. But dedicated HW is insanely inefficient. Opus estimates you can do it for $13k/month if you get committed pricing on the HW.
- FinnKuhn 4mo agoI guess this depends on the scale you are planning. For big multinational cooperations that calculation could look different.
- pbhjpbhj 4mo agoThey could just be flagging that they're considering blacklisting as a way to get some more Trump coin sold or other bribes. Or indeed to get further money from USA companies - which way will Trump decide, only the numbers in his family's bank accounts can give us a clue.
- flanked-evergl 4mo ago> US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. Can you be specific about what data of yours were stolen by who?
- gazebo2 4mo agoAny text, code, image, video or audio they/anybody has ever uploaded to the public internet? Is this a real question?
- flanked-evergl 4mo agoHow was it stolen, exactly?
- gazebo2 4mo agoI'm not interested in explaining to you something immediately evident that you clearly disagree with. If you don't feel that trillion dollar companies training commercial products on the free labor of human writers/artists/engineers/etc. without their consent or compensation isn't "stealing" you're welcome to that opinion, but I believe that's what the GP was implying.
- cedws 4mo agoI'm in favour of sending as much data as possible to DeepSeek for them to train on. I'd happily zip up everything useful I have and send it to them if they asked for it.
- epolanski 4mo agoI can second this. Deepseek is great for mundane work day tasks. I use it via claude code, just pointing the api to deepseek. It's also not a clear "Opus 4.8 >> DS 4 Pro", I've done 16 tasks in 4 days across the two, and while Opus was indeed on average better, both models performed well being able to handle most of my workload. In fact DeepSeek was _significantly_ better on 3 task out of 16 and Opus was _significantly_ better only in 2 out of 16. So why I still claim Opus 4.8 to be the winner? Because the few times that DS failed or got off the rails, it failed much harder and needed several prompts to be realigned on the actual tasks. Another thing at which Deepseek is significantly behind is code reviewing. Opus is more intelligent/thorough, Deepseek will sometimes generate bogus or low quality feedback. And the last thing at which Opus is better, period, is vibe coding. If you want to implement features end-to-end it handles ultracode flows quite better. I don't vibe code at work, but I do so with personal projects. But the cost concern is real. I've spent sub 2$ in 5 days of work using DS 4 Pro, which is on average just 4 queries to Anthropic. Give me a slightly better DS 4 (it is still in preview and training isn't finished) and I may ditch Anthropic for good.
- Bnjoroge 4mo agoHave you tried glm 5.2? It’s better than ds4pro and very close to opus4.6. Alot more expensive than ds4pro/mimo but significantly chesper than opus 4.6 for 90% of the quality
- epolanski 4mo agoI haven't yet, no. I alternate between Opus 4.8 and DS 4. If I remove my Anthropic subscription I will get GLM 5.2 in place of it.
- mctaylor 4mo agoThe fact that America has yet to figure out the importance of soft power (and TRUST in particular) in the AI/information age is mind boggling to me. The CLOUD act, FISA rulings, the Snowden leaks, and now the aggressive tech oligarch push to weaponize the unholy combination of AI, MAGA, and social media algorithms in an absurd and patently obvious attempt to impose (or maintain?) "world domination" seems likely to cement their downfall. "Authoritarian" China's low-cost and open source approach looks downright democratic by comparison. It seems increasingly clear to me that AI is forcing a reckoning in terms of how we interpret authority and control in light of new ways that information is evolving. The old political labels seem grossly insufficient to describe the present reality and the ones whining about "democracy", "freedom", and "liberal values" increasingly sound (and act) like bitter, out of touch old men desperately clinging onto a world that is rapidly outgrowing them. Last time I checked, the closest approximation of liberal values are "liberty, equality, fraternity". They seem to think that "liberty" should only apply to them, "equality" is a threat to their consolidated power, and "fraternity" is something that should be weaponized to turn communities against one another to distract from the ways the oligarchs have been and continue to abuse and consolidate their power.