An alternative I've tried is to ask Claude Code to create programming exercises or challenges on some topic and then ask it to check my work after every step while giving feedback. It worked surprisingly well, so this is the right call for CodeCrafters because AI is far more effective and cheaper at creating educational content and being a personal tutor.
It would depend on the complexity of the challenge. Knowing that a knowledgeable human took the time to verify the project/exercise gives a learner confidence that they are in the right track, not going down a path of hallucinations
Once they have their own coding agent which they seem to be working towards, I may start predominantly using their models. They seem to be doing all the "right" things, open sourcing models, publishing research, and keeping prices low for everyone.
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/
# 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/
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 $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.
But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.
I don’t even use Claude that much and was hitting limits in the 20$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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:
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.
The image shows Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. He has lately been on a huge AI psychosis streak, bragging about things like "shipping 37000 lines of code every day" and "using Claude Code so much it burned out his USB-C power connectors". He's in a lobster suit because he's talking about OpenClaw, an AI agent assistant which those same AI psychosis types lean into too much by giving it full read-write access to all their life and then getting surprised when it accidentally deletes all of their emails.
Pi's developer is obviously not anti-AI, and he definitely doesn't hate OpenClaw, since it's based on Pi. But there's a growing number of people who take those things too far, and a lot of them are on HN. You can easily find them in the comments of any AI-related post here. I assume that's the type of people the image is portraying.
It works very well with OpenCode. My team keeps hitting the 5h limits on other subscriptions and it's pretty good to have Deepseek as a backup. I just put 50 bucks on there and it feels like it'll never run out.
It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
I've noticed that models have gotten less finicky with this over time. Harnesses don't need to be complex to get good coding performance from models, they just need to implement some sane primitives for code exploration and editing.
It is in the model's provider's interest for you to believe this because they get to lock you into their harness and inference. As models get better they will get better at using any harness, it comes down to how well the harness is actually engineered. I highly recommend you take an hour or two and check out Pi to either solidify or change your assumption. The harness is essentially just another developer tool and can be as opinionated, overly-engineered, minimal as anything else. I would think for DeepSeek, especially, they're efforts are much better spent researching how to make their LLM's better instead of working on engineering a harness that might get some marginal gain building it for their models.
> What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?
I can't claim it's "the best"...
But the Pi.dev and OpenRouter combo is what I'm doing at home, and I love it.
Setup was easy, I can use /model to switch between any of the openrouter models and whatever I'm hosting locally via VLLM.
OpenCode Go is hard to beat, $10/mo ($5 first month) for up to $60 worth of tokens if used regularly. And no, you don't need to use opencode, they allow any software to use it.
Earlier this week I started testing Chinese models on my codebase. I haven’t really looked at interactive coding yet, but more at issue triage, bug auto-fixing, log analytics, etc.
I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed.
So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.
They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price
I switched to predomentantly using mimo this week, mostly out of curiosity to see how dependant I was on frontier models. Honestly I cant really tell the difference. I would say I work on pretty average codebases with well know frameworks doing pretty typical things and initial impressions is that mimo, kimi and deepseek can probably handle what I need more or less the same as gpt5.5 or claude.
I personally really like DS4 Flash - it's the largest I can run locally with decent speeds and I feel like it's good enough to maintain a codebase with less effort
maybe i need to give it second chance, surprisingly Kimi 2.6 consistently fail even to generate valid json plan, where gemma 4 was doing really good, but slow.
I would prefer a coding agent to be somewhat independent of the model provider. Providers are trading off on quality, features, and price so frequently, and I don't want to keep changing my agent every time.
I am looking forward to things slowing down and stabilizing. I'm not saying that should happen today, just I am looking forward to it.
You can use DeepSeek with my coding agent VT Code. Recently I've added DeepSeek V4 Pro and DeepSeek V4 Flash support with all providers, via: Official DeepSeek API, HuggingFace, Ollama Cloud, OpenRouter providers.
The DS4 folks are unofficially testing ways to run the model with lower performance on lower-RAM machines. Similar efforts are going on with llama.cpp. The results are a bit of a challenge, prefill time tends to explode which is a limitation if you care about agentic workflows.
Using it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).
You seem to have tried a few things, if you don't mind I have a few questions as someone currently on Claude Code but would prefer to not lock myself in a commercial ecosystem (and their pricing change regarding headless usage is annoying me):
- how do/would you add the WebSearch tool to your harness? pay for a separate service or does deepseek offer something with their subscriptions?
- do pi/opencode support pasting images in prompts?
- how do you handle reading images? deepseek is not multi modal IIRC? do you pay for another model and route to it?
Any of these missing would really annoy me in day to day use...
Brave, Exa, and Tavily all offer a free tier for websearch, after that it comes out to like 1¢/search, very easy to ask pi to build a web search tool using any of these providers.
They support image locations like a file or url, but not regular images (opencode desktop might though?)
Both pi and opencode make it very easy to change models so you can easily call to 5.4-mini or whichever multi-modal LLM for reading images. I'm sure you could even create a skill to automate the process too, having the model use the cli to send the photo to the multi-modal and give it back a description.
Yes I'm also using it for coding: I often make the agent use WebSearch in the research phase when deciding on a stack or a library or research best/modern practices to do achieve something. As for images I find it super useful to be able to paste snipped screenshots to show the agent when something is wrong in a UI/frontend or just something I can't copy paste easily.
I also encountered an issue with my credits. I was previously subscribed to the max plan, claimed credits, then downgraded to the pro plan and noticed I lost my credits. I didn't unsubscribe, just downgraded plans as I wasn't using claude enough to justify needing max.
yes, their "contract" is insane right now, with so many edge cases. giving poor user experience. when they have so many users, these edge cases also compound. They should simplify things to to give peace to their engineers.
This could end up becoming a cat-and-mouse game where users programmatically try to turn their non-interactive usage of Claude Code to appear interactive and Anthropic tries to detect and charge that under API pricing. I don't know if there's a proper solution here because there will always be borderline use cases like using Claude Code on a cloud VM, where it would be nicer to interactively do work through sending and receiving messages on a custom frontend rather than SSHing and using the CLI.
Next thing to go will be loops and scheduled tasks, if they keep needing to trim usage to fit in the available compute, I suspect, if ‘claude -p’ is essentially gone, now.
In theory I would expect it to do everything the current frontier models are capable of but with the added benefit of real time interactivity for better collaboration. The biggest benefit may be the real time video input so it can take in that input in parallel with producing outputs steered by the input rather than taking in a video or all images at once and then producing a single output for all of that.
The noteworthy things to me are that the architecture is a transformer that takes in text, image, and audio input and produces text and audio output, all trained together, and it works in near real-time through interleaving inputs and outputs rather than pure generation of the output from a given prompt.
> Time-Aligned Micro-Turns. The interaction model works with micro-turns continuously interleaving the processing of 200ms worth of input and generation of 200ms worth of output. Rather than consuming a complete user-turn and generating a complete response, both input and output tokens are treated as streams. Working with 200ms chunks of these streams enables near real-time concurrency of multiple input and output modalities.
That's probably the main thing that distinguishes it from the multimodal models from other frontier labs as far as I can tell.
What's really interesting for me about multimodal architectures from the ground up is that we might start to see applications where different modalities are "facets" of the same thing. Like a coding agent that sees "code" + "IDE" + "memory mapping" + feedback from different plugins as different modalities. And it gets to output in them as well - text where it needs to, actions (not <action>call_something(params)</action> like we have today) and so on. Being able to "sit still" until one of the modalities triggers is really interesting.
We can do these things today, but they're "bolted on" as afterthoughts. Yet they work remarkably well. I wonder how well they'd work if trained int his combined regime, from the ground up.
I dislike the title because it doesn't clearly state it's a layoff. "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative with a roadmap outlining plans.
Yes. We've since changed the top link to a third-party article. We prefer to do this with corporate press releases* - this is probably the #1 exception to HN's "please post the original source" rule (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If anyone sees a better third-party article, we can change it again.
(Edit: it's not really an exception because the purpose of a corporate press release is usually to obscure the main story, which means it's misleading, so by HN rules we should change it.)
(Edit 2: I feel like I should add that this isn't specific to Cloudflare! It's literally a generic problem.)
It's interesting how every time there's a layoff, the blog post always has a title like "Preparing for what's next" or "An update on our workforce" or "Getting ready for the agentic era"!
I’ll never forget how when I was at Google, every email with subject line “An update on X” meant X was getting axed. Like, just say so in the subject line…
> "Building for the future" gave me the impression that it's about some major new initiative...
If you'll believe them, it indeed is:
... [the Leadership at Cloudflare] have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era ... reimagining every internal process, team, and role across the company.
... [This layoff is] not a cost-cutting exercise ... [but] Cloudflare defining how a world-class, high-growth company operates.
... We don't want to [mass layoff] again for the foreseeable future.
... [Cloudflare] cannot rest on the workflows and organizational structures that worked yesterday. We're confident that [Cloudflare] will be even faster and more innovative [after layoffs] ...
They're architecting their company for an agentic future? They're reimaginging the definition of a world-class, high-growth company? They're not resting on the workflows that worked yesterday?
blegh
What the hell does any of that actually mean? Like in real life words? Because that much corporate bullshit really sounds like it is a cost-cutting exercise.
The blog post was published a couple months ago, and it looks like there hasn't been a follow-up release with the fully trained model. I'm not sure if there's much to take away from an early checkpoint besides the unique architectural choices they made in their model for faster inference.
Some smaller models from the LFM2.5 family have been published on Huggingface by the end of March, a month ago.
It can be assumed that this larger model takes more time to complete post-training, but it will follow in the near future after those smaller LFM2.5 models.
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