It's quite good and the labs are definitely scared, that's why they are lowering API prices and continuing to subsidize subscription plans aggressively to keep anyone from using this stuff.
That said, has anyone else found DS models to be unpolished? They seem to "lose their mind" a lot more often than Claude/GPT. I have tried all of the top open source models that came out over the past ~4 months or so and the GLM models (5.2, 5.3, and 5.3-Flash) have been much more usable for me. They feel like Opus but X months ago, DS feels like something else.
Fwiw I work at a company where engineers use AI heavily to produce the majority of work outputs but we also have a Slack that's just as lively as ever and plenty of evidence of humanity. Your experience sounds bad and you may be able to find a better one! It's not all bad everywhere.
How established is your team? I can see how teams that existed from the pre-LLM era can maintain their vitality, but would expect newer teams to struggle a lot more. Also, remote or in-person?
Scares me. When the ruling class get robots servants they will have no need for even simple human interaction anymore and that will truly unleash them to do harm.
DeepSeek models have such good benchmark performance, amazing pricing, and the team over there seems to be widely considered impressive.
I just haven't found them to be very good? I've had a ton more success with the GLM models (since 5.2 anyway). Maybe I'm just holding it wrong, DS models seem to get stuck in loops or tell me nonsense. GLM feels like budget Claude.
My experience is complete opposite from yours. The V4 Flash was already quite good, but V4.1 is really very close to SOTA in my books. I've eval'd these models for weeks against Gemini 3.8, Kimi K3 and Opus 5, and DeepSeek absolutely wins these evals.
It's really crazy. We price per token our customers. If Kimi was about 30% of the price of Opus 5 for the same quality, DeepSeek is 1/10th of a price of Kimi K3. We've come down in price so much that I seriously cannot recommend other models before they reduce their pricing.
And what is really interesting is its programming ability. As I've said in my previous comments, I use agents a lot in my work. Since early Opus days until now I have 7-8 agents working in parallel for different tasks. Rust, design, GEPA, evals, analysis. For a long time Kimi K3 was the best model for this work, and before that GPT 5.5. But I still can't really believe how well DeepSeek works here. I really try to find faults from it, trying to see that it must be doing sloppy work and be worse than the others. But it does not. It finishes every task I give to it. And the cost per task is under a dollar, usually 15-30 cents.
In comparison the same task with Kimi would be 3-15 dollars; sometimes closing to 100. And before that with GPT 5.5 a 800 dollar task was not uncommon if I spent days evaluating models.
Now it's less than a dollar.
For me if the other providers will not drop their prices dramatically in the coming weeks I see no reason to use them. Even with a 200 dollar subscription, paying per token for DeepSeek is better value.
Unfortunately, it made a mistake and bricked it. I handed over to Astra but noticed that my watch was dead, it must have died immediately before. Too bad, unlucky me.
It’s funny, in oh-my-pi I’ve had much better luck with DS 4.1 Flash than GLM 5.3 flash. Glm seems to just constantly reason in circles before attempting a tool call
How are you holding it? You'll get wildly different real-world results from different inference providers, for one. For two there's the harness and what you do with it. In general you'll need to provide more direction to lightweight models, better guardrails, more planning, tighter goals.
Are you using the API directly from Deepseek? Otherwise, performance will suffer greatly. If you're using OpenRouter make sure to pin Deepseek as the provider. If you're using OpenCode Go who knows who the provider is.
Making Android apps was my introduction to publishing software. I remember in ~2011-2012 you could upload an APK and it would be published immediately and the Android Market had a "New" page which was just a chronological feed of recently published or updated apps. Just uploading your app update was an easy way to get ~500 free downloads which I found very exciting.
At the time I couldn't imagine paying $99 for an Apple Developer account and waiting a week to publish my app...
We're very happy with OpenRouter in production, although we use it in a pretty limited fashion. We have only ~10 providers allowlisted (based on their location and ZDR policies) and we use only a few models, often frontier models. Has been very reliable for us in production so far. It's generally been great for us to be able to have a single place to manage spend, policies, view logs, etc. Also really nice in code to have a single-line change for switching models. OpenRouter's console is so much better than what you get from the actual frontier labs, and it's nice not to have to translate numbers and concepts across providers.
Does anyone have any recommendations for something like Cursor but more open? Cursor's harness is so much faster than anything else I've used that I just can't give it up, using Claude Code feels like being on 0.25x speed. Also I do like the IDE-style UI, being able to highlight code in a file editor and then quickly add that to my chat (Cmd-L) is really nice and much more difficult in CLI based harnesses.
Right now I think GPT 5.6 Luna is by far the most cost effective model, so this change is effectively kicking me off of Cursor.
This, and the keep/undo flow, forking agent sessions (including renaming them)... The UX could be better at places but the core features of what Cursor has (for someone who came from VS Code) is an unbeatable mix. Really would like to find something else.
I did try Kiro which seems to have the same philosophy but it's just not there. Most of the features I like in Cursor are missing.
Some other commenters mentioned that VS Code + Copilot would be better these days. Dunno.
I am also wondering the same thing as OP. Somewhat tangential thought, but I recently realised that what I would really love in an IDE is a "first class" Markdown editing experience, just because most of my day-to-day is managing and writing docs rather than editing code. Cursor has Markdown rendering support of course but it seems to have two implementations, each sort of clunky in their own way. And I want something more WYSIWYG but with Latex / flowchart / etc. support built-in.
OpenKnowledge seems to maybe fill that niche somewhat (it also supports annotating Markdown with comments to feed into an agent), and has agent integration within the GUI, but one killer feature that seems to be missing is Remote SSH support (short of hosting its web server on the remote and having the IDE live in the browser).
There really has never been another product priced like AI is being priced right now. Each of these things has been done before, but all of them together is new.
1. Insanely discounted starter plans. Claude $200/mo plan is like $5k-$8k of API rate usage.
2. Very limited cost visibility, they make it hard to figure out where you spent money (unless you're on the enterprise plan which is for people with unlimited money).
3. Nobody, not even the model provider, knows what your request will cost before it returns. You're writing a blank check every time you hit enter.
4. When you run out you run out very suddenly and disruptively. It's very hard to tell a developer on the 28th of the month "sorry, code by hand until the 1st of next month" so you tend to grant exceptions.
5. The price is changing all the time. New models come in, old models come out, prices change, caching behavior changes, harnesses change, etc. The cost of doing a single task is not predictable even if the task does not change.
6. Basically no volume discounting. Anthropic offered us 2% off for committing to $1M+ per year at API rates.
I manage AI spend for my team at work and I try really hard to keep costs under control but it's absolutely herding cats. Much harder than any other spending I've ever had to manage at work.
Anthropic's run as the AI Good Guys lasted ... 6 months? Hope they had fun. Turns out there aren't any AI good guys. Every single one of these companies engages in all the same BS. At least with open weights models we (the users) get to keep something when the whole thing collapses.
That said, has anyone else found DS models to be unpolished? They seem to "lose their mind" a lot more often than Claude/GPT. I have tried all of the top open source models that came out over the past ~4 months or so and the GLM models (5.2, 5.3, and 5.3-Flash) have been much more usable for me. They feel like Opus but X months ago, DS feels like something else.