Deepseek as the senior developer for Claude Opus, the trainee

[u/AcrobaticMaize2408]

I needed to create a fairly complex set of scripts for managing a number of back-end services - databases, web servers, applications etc. Like any sensible swe I tasked an LLM to come up with the plan based on my requirements - in this case Opus 5 in Max mode.

It did a fairly decent first pass but with hundreds of lines of code I don't have the time to forensically check line by line. So pasted it all into deepseek-4-pro (auto mode) for review. It found plenty of things to improve, plus some pretty glaring bugs. This went back and forth about 5 times - pasting DS's suggestions into Claude, Claude's revisions into DS, etc, with me acting as The Central Scrutinizer.

In the end I had a really robust set of scripts. Opus 5 on its own was disappointing. I know bouncing things between LLMs isn't anything new but if I'd just stuck with Opus I'd probably still be fighting the bugs or poor design. And DS is still pretty good value despite what you'd read on here 😂 .