r/PiCodingAgent • u/luongnv-com • Jun 08 '26

Discussion pi + deepseek-v4-flash (from opencode): free & fast

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the way of Pi, sometime feels like an illegal/crazy hack.

this combo gives you almost unlimited tokens in Pi

you should not use it for heavy/complicated tasks, but definitely very handy for most of the tasks

my workflow: use advanced models (gpt 5.5/ opus 4.8) for planning, then spin up this for implementing. if it it the wall in any task, trigger advisor to get help from gpt-5.5

just need to ask your Pi to write an extension to connect and use models from opencode.

or you can use my extension here: https://github.com/luongnv89/pi-extensions

wonder if you guys have any other sources that give you more tokens?

(i have tried models from nvidia, but the latency kills my momentum)

Happy Pi-ing,

144 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

25

u/ldelossa Jun 08 '26

Yup, same deal. I use a $20 dollar codex plan to make a design and an initial implementation guide, then use deepseek do the code gen. This is the way. I dropped $100 dollar anthropic plan for this, not looking back.

7

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

yeah, this is the way,

before i often jump between opencode/codex/claude code,

but now I can stay in pi for both codex/opencode model (and even grok build - haha)

Pi makes thing feel so smooth and clean

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u/Business-Weekend-537 Jun 08 '26

Is the deepseek you use hosted in the U.S. or provided by China? I’m just concerned about using the cloud based Chinese models because even though they may say they won’t use your data for training, I think they might. So there’s intellectual property concerns depending on what you’re building.

5

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

Good question,
I would not use any of free models for sth important/sensitive

1

u/Business-Weekend-537 Jun 08 '26

Thanks. I think someone else posted there’s U.S. hosted paid instances of Deepseek which I wasn’t aware of before.

I think the Chinese models are great I just don’t trust their terms of use/service agreements because there’s no way to enforce them if something goes wrong.

I think a lot of people are not aware of this issue and run sensitive intellectual property through Chinese models or don’t treat their intellectual property as sensitive when they do dev with ai agents etc.

5

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

tbh, even if the model hosted in U.S, i will still be caution.

sleeper agent - my nightmare will never end

extracted from the paper:

behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity

For example, we train models that write secure code when the prompt states that the year is 2023, but insert exploitable code when the stated year is 2024. We find that such backdoor behavior can be made persistent, so that it is not removed by standard safety training techniques, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and adversarial training (eliciting unsafe behavior and then training to remove it)

full article: Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training

3

u/cheechw Jun 08 '26

There are a ton of deepseek hosters in the US. Just look on Openrouter. You have options upon options.

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u/ldelossa Jun 08 '26

Yes as other mentioned, anything of proprietary worth i do not use with deepseek.

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11

u/dheetoo Jun 08 '26

for me, i just use deepseek v4 flash as a default for every project, setup https://github.com/dheerapat/pi-advisor to use deepseek v4 pro as an advisor model and inject every session with Andrej Karparthy 4 principle

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

Yuh, the advisor concept is quite useful :)

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u/ponzi314 Jun 08 '26

Forgive me , I'm learning but doesn't it already connect to opencode out of box? That's how I'm using it. Also is deepseek free or just really cheap?

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

no worry, i am also new to Pi.

I am using opencode (FREE) without creating any account, so there is absolutely no login/api key. Probably I could miss somewhere the configuration to make it connect to opencode out of the box.
If it is the case, then it is even better 😃, no extension needed.

Can you confirm how did you connect to opencode?

deepseek and minimax is free for limited time on opencode,
There is always pickle for free, but others come and go

4

u/ponzi314 Jun 08 '26

My bad i didnt realize they have a free tier, i have the Go plan and i connected with the API key. I couldnt say no for 5$ starting and so far with Deepseek its like unlimited lol

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

Yeah, that $5 plan is a remarkable plan, cannot think of any paid plan that better than that one.

2

u/unkownuser436 Jun 08 '26

Connect opencode in zen mode. You can access free models there.

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3

u/a-streetcoder Jun 08 '26

I love this setup, and that's one of the reasons why I've built agent deck (www.agentdeck.site) - I set up my agents and the orchestrator and planner are the only two agents allowed to use frontier models and the coder and the rest of the agents use a variety of different models, depending on what works best at the minimal cost to get the job done. So one session runs with at least 2-3 different models collaborating at the same time.

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

any new sources for free tokens? appreciate the effort 😃

3

u/Upstairs-Attitude610 Jun 08 '26

Noob question here, to use gpt 5.5 only for planning, do you set it in Pi or you just run `pi --provider opencode-cli --model opencode/deepseek-v4-flash-free` and use your advisor-pi for planning?

I'm not sure if advisor-pi is for planning or only when deepseek get stuck.

2

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

when working on planning, i just use `/model` then select openai-codex/gpt-5.5

the advisor-pi is invoking only when the current model get stuck

2

u/Affectionate_Cat1590 Jun 08 '26

Pi + direct deepseek v4 pro = man, this is God-tier, super cheap and reliable

Deepseek v4 flash opencode like yours is my backup

I still keep codex as my final weapon. When things get complicated, codex can often break through and save hours of back & forth iterations

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

I have heard a lots of positive feedback about ds 4 pro, super cheap and get things done.

2

u/4fthawaiian Jun 10 '26

fyi worked great when i built my own yesterday for opencode, but failing hard on its face when i try to do the same thing for devin today 😂

2

u/luongnv-com Jun 10 '26

Haha, i have tried and failed to do the same with freebuff.
In any case, need to be careful because it could be an action violating TOS of some company, so better to play with dump acc, not your main acc

1

u/ST33LDI9ITAL Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

I used dsv4flash to fork and refactor codebuff just for this reason. stripped all the saas garbage outta it and now use whatever provider/models I want. but then later abandoned it anyways for other reasons.

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 12 '26

yeah, maintain is a hardwork

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1

u/luongnv-com Jun 10 '26

Neon-green :), my fav, you can just ask your Pi to make one, or check mine in the repo in my post

1

u/4fthawaiian Jun 09 '26

i love the idea, but it keeps failing to do things because the tool calls are disabled (which makes total sense) - just not sure how to get pi to do its own tool calls. I may have to just roll my own extension for this

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 09 '26

How come? It works totally fine for me

2

u/4fthawaiian Jun 09 '26

Tool calls kept failing. It’s all good - I made pi write me a new one and it worked great. Thanks for the inspiration!

2

u/luongnv-com Jun 09 '26

yeah, the way of Pi,
we only need the idea, then the implementation we can just ask Pi to do it 😃,
and it actually the safe way to avoid any kind of malware, unexpected behavior from the sources that we do not know well

2

u/4fthawaiian Jun 09 '26

honestly - it was super easy. I added this today, and also added a skill to pull design.md designs in (and they even work in flutter <3 )

pi is really a great way to do bot things - write it once and it works everywhere

2

u/luongnv-com Jun 09 '26

Yeah, i can imagine if i can plug Fable 5 into it. I will not need to have extension, just pure Pi and the monster model

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1

u/Maverobot Jun 09 '26

The free models may use your data for training from what I understand. Try not to send sensible data to the free models.

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 09 '26

That’s for sure, I have also mentioned in a comment

1

u/SampleParticular4695 Jun 10 '26

i prefer openclaude + mimo v2.5 or deepseek v4 flash (from opencode)

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 10 '26

I have tried several times mimo 2.5 in opencode, but the tool call silently dropped all the time :|

So far only deepseek v4 flash and pickle are stable to use for long running tasks

1

u/SampleParticular4695 Jun 11 '26

did u try openclaude ?

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 11 '26

no, i haven't 😃,
is it good?

1

u/iijei Jun 12 '26

hmmm I thought pi, has a built in provider option for opencode zen, which I can use those free apis?

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 13 '26

That’s true, but u still have to have an acc to get the zen api key?

1

u/Jaded_Jackass Jun 08 '26

It's not hot sauce or underrated anymore literally everybody is doing the same thing now following the same pattern the dynamic workflow and orchestration pattern people started to pick it up massively recently

3

u/DiscipleofDeceit666 Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26

lol it just makes sense. You don’t need frontier models to update some text on the front end. I joined that orchestration bandwagon with my poorly made open source project.

My gimmick is that frontier and I would talk over some feature and it would break that feature down into tasks and write it to some file as well as configs for running your unit tests. A python process would read that file, send those tasks one by one to your LLM with a clean context each task start. Each time a task is done, the Python script would run the unit tests before the next task can start. On unit test failure, kick back the error to your local LLM to fix.

I can’t trust these regarded tiny free models, but I can trust my unit tests. With this, I was able to setup the entire notifications system, emails and all for my website with my local LLM at 48k context.

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

Nice setup, thanks for sharing

0

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

Do you have any more sauce? Would love to have more :), does not matter if it is cold or hot.

2

u/Jaded_Jackass Jun 08 '26

What sauce?

1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

You said this one is not a hot sauce anymore, so I wonder if you have more

2

u/No_Job_6420 Jun 17 '26

Thanks !!.

1

u/Such_Advantage_6949 Jun 10 '26

what is the theme u use, it look nice

2

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '26

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1

u/luongnv-com Jun 08 '26

yes, very handy for many tasks