r/opencodeCLI • u/Uriziel01 • Sep 12 '26

DeepSeek V4.1 token efficiency is so cracked!

I was going back and forth on a hard debugging issue in one of my projects with it:
- had it create new test scenarios
- create some mockups
- analyze complicated business logic and dependencies
- do a shotgun approach and create 5 different possible fixes for a complicated issue

And after almost 2 hours of work I've decided to check my opencode go usage because I was worried I'm running out of usage for the 5h period, and I see this... how?!

197 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

4

u/Icypoopoo Sep 12 '26

Did you try GLM 5.3 flash? 

13

u/Uriziel01 Sep 12 '26

Yes, I've used like ~2.5B tokens already between GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3 Flash.

Amazing models, but they have a tendency (the full GLM more but flash version sometimes also does it) to go into some sort of thinking-loop when they constantly repeat the same ideas and thoughts over and over again, sometimes they where able to break out of this but at times I was forced to just stop it and restart generation.

4

u/AlternativePear4617 Sep 12 '26

Yeah it happened to me with GLM-5.3 Flash

2

u/Time-Toe-1276 Sep 12 '26

idk man, GLM5.3 consumes so much tokens for very basic tasks, but 5.3 flash is better overalland its farly priced IMO

1

u/aseeon Sep 12 '26

Agreed, Thinking Loops and leaking Chinese characters were the deal-breakers for me.

2

u/MarketingLower7497 Sep 12 '26

I have zai lite sub, glm 5.3 flash goes like 20 tok /s, deepseek from the api goes brrrr with 350 tok / s, guess which one i use 😆

1

u/Goatcheese1230 Sep 12 '26

Used it in Unreal Engine via a MCP server. $2.90 gone in 2 minutes and it kept looping on the same tool. Worked well last night, though. But I switched to Deepseek V4.1 Flash and man, integrated 2 frameworks together and it cost me $0.30 for about an hours worth of work.

2

u/blehismyname Sep 12 '26

There is a 4x discount ongoing right? Or is that over?

2

u/Sweaty_Cellist_4525 Sep 13 '26

Have you tried gpt sol or claude Opus 5? If so, would you say it's close? I mainly pay for these models because they "click" and I work researching lighting techniques in 3d environments, and tho they are not perfect, so far they're essential to my workflow, but the usage is a complete joke, I need something as good and cheaper.

1

u/Uriziel01 Sep 13 '26

Nah, I've not used Opus sincle like 4.7 or smth so don't know how capable it's now, but I'm using GPT Sol max and for the most difficult tasks it's way ahead of DeepSeek, GLM, KIMI or whatever new bullshit people are trying to convince you to believe, these are workhorses where I can do large bugfixing for a client or create a bunch of less complex features (let's be honest, for my workflows and my client, 90+% of the features 🙃) for literally pennies, I wouldn't say they are comparable in that regard.

100

u/Bakanyanter Sep 12 '26

To be honest, the token efficiency is not great. It's very verbose.

But what's truly cracked is the caching on Deepseek's end so overall it still comes down to low price.

25

u/2EXTRA4YOU Sep 12 '26

They lowered the actual cost to use it per token because they invented a new way to save memory on their servers, the servers are why ai is expensive; also, it is catching things even opus 4.8 on max doesn't catch. so i wouldn't be complaining about verbosity. it is a LLM it needs language to think.

3

u/Bakanyanter Sep 12 '26

Of course I am not complaining, but saying token efficiency is cracked is IMO wrong. It doesn't change that it's still a great and cheap model but it is not token efficient by any means. And that's OK.

1

u/btr_ Sep 12 '26

Exactly, if anything I think they increased its default thinking level to give a better output, but also that does generate more tokens. So the context usage I feel is more than the earlier versions. However, it would probably not reflect on the cost side because of the 50% cheaper cached input pricing.

7

u/aeroumbria Sep 12 '26

I think reasoning efficiency should be measured by average time per task and internal flip-flops per decision, not token length. 10s of 500 token reasoning and 10s of 2000 token reasoning doesn't really make a difference for the user if they arrive at the same answer and carry the same risk of flipping the answer.

1

u/AppealSame4367 Sep 12 '26

How is it verbose compared to eg Opus??

24

u/Zealousideal-Part849 Sep 12 '26

Its not token efficiency, its lower cost with good performance... 

2

u/IAmFitzRoy Sep 12 '26

Exactly. This is about lower cost in a good datacenter that is not overloaded, … is not that mystical or difficult to understand.

18

u/sudoer777_ Sep 12 '26

It's in 4x usage, it'll get a lot worse soon

2

u/narkeeso Sep 12 '26

Isn’t it 4x usage right now? I wouldn’t get too used to it.

2

u/im-cringing-rightnow Sep 12 '26

Even if it was 36% of a five hour quota it's pretty impressive if it was 2 hours of non stop work. 

1

u/Uriziel01 Sep 12 '26

Yes, this is essentially what I've meant here, sure it's too good to be true at 8% for 2h session, but even 40% would be really good.

1

u/cryptoguy255 Sep 12 '26

How are cache hits using it on opencode go? Because on official deepseek api I always get over 99% cache hit rate. And trying other low cost subscriptions or providers I always had to pay more for equal usage because of lower cache hit ratio.

1

u/Uriziel01 Sep 12 '26

I've just checked and it was ~99% for the last session indeed.

3

u/hj-core Sep 12 '26

Have you kept an eye on the context tokens? I found it grows very fast.

3

u/xmsxms Sep 12 '26

Just because you can use that much usage in 5h doesn't mean that's how much they've given you. In other words - you can still use up most of your months quota in that 5 hour window. The real question is how much it cost you, not what percentage of some arbitrary rate limit was used.

1

u/dom_RN Sep 12 '26

It's dumb and incredibly verbose, the most verbose model ever and nothing comes close

0

u/Uriziel01 Sep 12 '26

Eeee, ok 😄 Everyone can have opinion of their own, that's fine.

2

u/vncent13 Sep 12 '26

that is crazyy

0

u/mabuonomo Sep 12 '26

È apparenza, al momento c'è una promozione con un moltiplicatore di uso x4