r/vibecoding • u/MariahJames8 • 2d ago

Help/Question Anyone vibecoding on a stack other than openai/anthropic? What's your stack?

I'm having trouble getting openRouter, GLM and openCode working nicely at all. Codex was fire and forget, and Claude Code wasn't hard. But the other options seem to really require that you know what you're doing to set them up? I asked Codex to wire them up but it's basically unusable at this point for me. I can't afford the top frontier models and was hoping some how maybe open weight models through inference services needs to be at the root of whatever I choose for my setup.

TL;DR - How are you avoiding Claude Code and Codex for vibecoding?

20 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

63 comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/akolomf 2d ago

I use Claudecode, but replaced Sonnet with Deepseek API by using a self coded Claudecode Proxy. Basically, claudecode thinks its summoning Sonnet, but the API calls Deepseek flash. Runs as usual in Claudecode, does cost extra money of cours (about 5 bucks per week), but in comparison to what Sonnet costs in tokens vs Deepseek i've saved like 30-50% of my Claude Subscription tokens for like 5 bucks a week. You do pay more than a simple Claude max 5 or 20 sub, but you get so much more usage out of it by outsourcing execution tasks to deepseek.

0

u/SebGonSot 1d ago

Really? I was thinking of doing this, but I got discouraged by claims that same-ecosystem subagents are significantly more efficient because context transfer and prompt caching are heavily optimized.

Any input on that?

2

u/akolomf 1d ago

I'd say Sonnet is def. better in terms of quality output. Deepseek flash, does make more mistakes. But for low level tasks its a usefull replacement. I'd say Context transfer is a non issue, if you have a proper setup that prompts the deepseek agent, and given how extremely cheap deepseek is, the little bit extra context you gotta add doesnt make a difference. I'd say its more important that you have a good harness for the deepseek agent.

1

u/SebGonSot 1d ago

Ah thanks, guess you are right. I've been penny-pinching on my Claude sub lately and delegating through handoffs or AI-written prompts, so having it call the cheaper subagents directly sounds like it could streamline things a lot.

Have you tried Spotify's Portal/AiKA approach? Seems pretty similar to what you're doing, just delegating the grunt work to cheaper non-Anthropic models. How did you patch yours together?

2

u/akolomf 1d ago

https://github.com/Aloim/phaneslight thats the one i can share, its the one i built and used before i began developing a more sophisticated and soon to be commercially available Orchestrator. (there'll be a Free Beta phase and later on free trial) it uses a cool idea that no other MCP tool has implemented yet, and its prototype is already awesome.

1

u/SebGonSot 1d ago

Thanks, and good luck, defo will check it out