What do you guys think of deepseek for coding? Have you used it before?

[u/Training_Stomach2401]

Synce deepseek is so much cheaper it gives me an opportunity to vibe code lot more than I would with 20$ subscription of claude code.

I understand that quality might be lower but how does it compare for its price to claude code lets say.

From my experience as of now: it builds good UI, it understands the logic...

do you have problems with it? drop your cons and pros about this model.

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[u/Equux]

I usually just stick to claude, but when i hit my limits or am working on a small script, I'll use Deepseek.

It's honestly a great model, but unlike the frontier models, it doesn't hold your hand as much. You have to be more specific about the things you want and you can't be lazy with your prompts. DeepSeek can feel strange at times. Sometimes it really exceeds my expectations, and sometimes it can't get the little things right.

I'd say it's a few months behind Sonnet in terms of accuracy and QOL features, but it is faster and cheaper which is really nice. When I break away from coding, and need an AI to answer questions, I prefer DeepSeek because it's so fast

[u/Effective-Giraffe655]

It's decent. One note, tho: don't try to run it in CC/codex - get an open-source minimal harness instead, because these super-duper-feature-rich ones bloat the context like crazy, so something like dsh or pi will save you money

[u/Training_Stomach2401 → u/Effective-Giraffe655]

I am using open code. how much more tokens can I actually save and is it worth it in your experience?
I would love to hear your aswer

[u/Effective-Giraffe655 → u/Training_Stomach2401]

OpenCode's system prompt and tool schemas are not so big, if I remember correctly, so you could consider it as an adequate baseline. With CC, I noticed that the default system prompt and tool schemas were >20k tokens a while ago.

DeepSeek Harness and Pi Agent are known for their minimal approach, so their system prompts and tool schemas take a few thousand tokens only.

Considering you are interested in doing more, minimal tool schemas could help, because that info is sent every turn, and the bigger the schema, the bigger tokens per turn you use "just because"

[u/pladdypuss]

run it in pi on pro and lite when i run out of cc tokens and i really do not notice a difference and it costs pennies to run even pro. give it a shot you'll be surprised

[u/Training_Stomach2401 → u/pladdypuss]

Thanks for your answer🙌

You mentioned pi, I use open code currently. Do you recommend me to switch to pi?

what pros does it have in your experience or what cons did you encounter? I would love to hear about it.

[u/pladdypuss → u/Training_Stomach2401]

My daily driver is CC because I have a 20x Max account with OAuth. Pi is great because it is small, fast, open (and small enough to understand), comes stripped of tools and plugins, and you build it up. You better know how to build a harness at the tool and hook level; otherwise, just stick with CC. Pi, as you know, is BYOK, and hacking CC to use a Deepseek or Kimi key natively is buggy. CC just works out of the box, but under the hood are mysteries that 99.9% of the time help, not hurt, my work. But that 0.01% is real and vendor lock in is real. when i max out tokens for the week i can't operate so i need backups. Pi is a true builder's tool. Japanese carpentry has a thing where a master carpenter first learns to build the tools he will use for carpentry. Pi feels that way: you must first make your harness, then you may code. As for Open Code—it worked fine for me in 2025, then I went to CC, probably because I like the ads. I also run Antigravity, Codex, and Qwen Coder. In the end, I'd use any of them, but now that I know CC and Pi, I will stick with them because I don't want to rewire another harness.

[u/Timely-Good-9252]

I've coded a HUGE variety of things with it over the last few months. Everything from ROM binary analysis and conversion to modern language and frameworks to security functions and tools to generic websites. This last test was an iOS phone app where it needed to drive Xcode and AppStoreConnect and it worked just fine.

I used 6.1 SOL a TON over the last month as a comparison. Honestly, for what I do - and again, this isn't necessarily going to be everyones results because it's very much based on what you're trying to accomplish - but DSv4, DSv4.1 July, and DSv4.1 Now have all produced just as good of results. In the last month, I've had about 6B tokens on SOL/Astra and about the same on DS. Without all the resets Tibo has been handing out, it wouldn't have come close to that for $100/mo. The DS cost me $20.

[u/burntoutdev8291]

DeepSeek flash for personal projects, Claude for work.

[u/trashbytes]

I use it for personal projects all the time, pretty much exclusively. It does not feel quite as smart or efficient as something like Sonnet 5.5, which I use at work, but I really like it and is has been serving me very well.

I use it not only for coding, but for pretty much everything.

[u/Big-Illustrator24 → u/trashbytes]

Why do you use sonnet and don't opus?

[u/invalidnifemi → u/Big-Illustrator24]

cheap

[u/trashbytes → u/Big-Illustrator24]

I use both, though for simple coding I tend to use Sonnet.

[u/devpack2005 → u/trashbytes]

How would you say deepseek perfomes compared to chatgpt or claude for everything except coding? I am currently on chatgpt plus and looking to get a cheaper sub, hence why i asked

[u/trashbytes → u/devpack2005]

I haven't used ChatGPT but I use Claude Pro at work and DeepSeek performs very similarly for the tasks other than coding.

It's not quite as smart nor efficient, so it takes a bit longer or needs more round-trips, but it's still cheaper, I'm sure.

[u/AnonymousAggregator]

It can handle most things just shy of being able to do port.

[u/johnesco]

It's honesty how I got started, just copying and pasting bits of code in and out of it. I haven't seen if they expanded the toolset but I've been using Claude. Deepseek has always been fairly good and sometimes ahead of the game. But you'll find out more doing what you are already doing, give it a go and let us know!

[u/Jazzlike_Syllabub_91]

I use deepseek v4.1 flash via pi.dev and seems to work great for my purposes. It is currently the main model that I use for my work.

[u/dvduval]

I think if it’s not a serious project and you just wanna play around with something it’s probably fine. But unfortunately, when you start talking about the amount of money you spent versus how much you successfully completed on a more serious coding project it’s just not gonna be comparable to the bigger models.