I'm not curious what tasks you tested it for. Im working on coding agent writing code dynamically on request for customers. i'd say code itself very simple and aggressively cached, and patternalized, e.g. we adding lots of hints to the system.

the only real family models that work were claude and openai, surprisingly, for tasks that needs faster speed, gpt 5.4 is very impressive. Deep seek was very average , doing things somewhere in gemini flash 3.0 domain.

I'm working on a custom launcher for hooking up Claude Code with various providers (groups env variables in profiles) cause DeepSeek doesn't have vision and sometimes I need browser use with screenshots or Opus reasoning, for other tasks it's fine: https://ccode.kronis.dev/

  # After installed (or when run portably with ./ccode)
  ccode init-config
  ccode edit-config
  
  # Run with default profile
  ccode
  # Run with named profile
  ccode --deepseek
  
  # Set default profile
  ccode set-default-profile deepseek

Overall though I'm not sure exactly how well Claude Code would stack up against OpenCode, since the latter overall feels a bit less hacky with 3rd party models and is even getting niche but nice features like a locally runnable web version: https://opencode.ai/docs/web/

How does the cost compare using the API vs the $20/month plans with other providers?

I did some back of the envelope calculations and it seems like you would pay $5/month using DeepSeek directly or $15-20 with OpenRouter or similar. But would be interested to hear real world usage.

I am curious - Is there a way to switch between models depending on the task? Because I believe Deepseek V4 is not multimodal and it will be good to switch back to Claude if vision or other capabilities are required.

That's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around.

Which begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)

Surprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.

I'm doing Chinese learning website I've tested all Chinese-first top tier models for a range of different tasks.

Your selection seems good, I'd drop MIMO, while promising it can't compare to deepseek v4pro, GLM 5+ or kimi 2.6 thinking.

But I'm writing with a word of advice - I've been using openrouter and for some models (especially kimi) it can be so subtly yet deeply worse through OR than when using directly that I've cut myself twice, even using quality-first providers, specific quantizations etc. It's not a feels-like-it result but doing hundreds/thousands queries where I have some objective metrics to evaluate the results and testing OR and direct on the exact same inputs.

Plus kimi swarm available through their website is quite impressive for some researchy stuff.

maybe i need to give it second chance, surprisingly Kimi 2.6 consistently fail even to generate valid json plan, where gemma 4 was doing really good, but slow.

I personally really like DS4 Flash - it's the largest I can run locally with decent speeds and I feel like it's good enough to maintain a codebase with less effort

I probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.

Yeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.

RL with the harness inputs and outputs of users is one of the primary improvers of model performance, a self perpetuating flywheel.

What's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?

I wonder how many years it'll take for the API token cost to exceed the money spent on ram.

Using it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).

You seem to have tried a few things, if you don't mind I have a few questions as someone currently on Claude Code but would prefer to not lock myself in a commercial ecosystem (and their pricing change regarding headless usage is annoying me):

- how do/would you add the WebSearch tool to your harness? pay for a separate service or does deepseek offer something with their subscriptions?

- do pi/opencode support pasting images in prompts?

- how do you handle reading images? deepseek is not multi modal IIRC? do you pay for another model and route to it?

Any of these missing would really annoy me in day to day use...