You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].

I tried it and it's impressive.

[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

Earlier this week I started testing Chinese models on my codebase. I haven’t really looked at interactive coding yet, but more at issue triage, bug auto-fixing, log analytics, etc.

I used DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Qwen, and MiMO against GPT-5.5 high as reference, all running in Pi harness without anything installed.

So far, Kimi and MiMO look the most promising to me. I haven’t tested them rigorously enough to make a strong statement, but my first impression is that, in practice, all those models may be less behind on typical daily tasks than people think.

They are a bit “work hard, not smart". Getting to same-ish results more slowly and using more tokens, but at a fraction of the price

It works very well with OpenCode. My team keeps hitting the 5h limits on other subscriptions and it's pretty good to have Deepseek as a backup. I just put 50 bucks on there and it feels like it'll never run out.

It's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!

Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.

i have done some amazing things for 5 dollars, using opencode. give it a shot, it is incredibly cheap

Zed's Agent natively supports a DeepSeek API key now. (do not use it through OpenRouter if you want to save the most cost)

You no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.

Give pi a try if you haven't already. Avoid vendor harness lock-in.

All the major coding agents already support DeepSeek.

antirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.

open code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.

Both pi, opencode and zed work amazing with deepseek.

It’s good and cheap, but don’t talk about politics to it or it might trigger some sort of censorship rule. You can see it think, then suddenly erase everything and suggest to switch to another subject, without explaining anything. I also had it output some sort of generic message about how the news outlets are in the service of the people. Both times I was surprised because I didn’t make any sensitive requests, neither illegal nor subversive. But it was a remotely political topic and it was enough. There was something both chilling and refreshing about it, since censorship in the west is usually more subtle.

I live V4 Pro for certain things but I've been quite impressed with V4 Flash for coding. It's terse, to the point, tends to make few mistakes and is pretty fast.

Yes - the model is REALLY good. I try Claude at work and Deepseek personally and this is the only model that works without trying to actively bankcrypt me.

I think Deepseek uses much more tokens than other models.

It's actually even cheaper when you look at the cache read costs. Those costs can dominate in agent workflows and DeepSeek's cost for cache reads is insanely low comparatively. At $.003626/M tokens, the cheapest other thing on your list is >$.2/M tokens. That's on the scale of 100x cheaper.

And they don't make the model worse once you have a subscription!

It doesn't matter how good Opus is if 2 months into your subscription they make it worse than GPT 3 to save money.

*GLM 5.1

That's also a game changer for local inference. It unlocks long contexts, batched inference and storing the KV cache to disk on ordinary consumer platforms.

Yes. The discount was most likely a "post-market trial" of how efficient the caching works for the new generation models.

It's not an unreasonable concern, which is why most US companies prefer to go with AWS bedrock, or even one of the AI labs, and typically request zero data retention agreements. But leaking is a concern no matter where it's hosted, it's just the incentives that change IMO. For example, the labs do scan every chat and train on data not covered under enterprise ZDR agreements. Law enforcement can request access to all user data with a valid warrant or in an emergency context [1]

If you're interested in trying DeepSeek V4 privately, you can try Tinfoil (tinfoil.sh) where all models are hosted in an attested secure hardware enclave, making the inference end-to-end private. Full disclosure: I'm one of the cofounders.

[1] https://cdn.openai.com/trust-and-transparency/openai-law-enf...

Just use it through something like Azure. They host the entire model and serve it from the US. I'm sure that there are other providers like this.

We use it that way and it works great.

I would not be shocked if they do that. I would not be terribly shocked that the US-headquartered models do that for another government either. As far as data confidentiality goes, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Microsoft checks all those enterprise boxes, right? Yet, Azure still gets breached once in a while.

I think there is a nonzero chance of that happening. Beijing could at any point decide that DeepSeek has become too powerful and/or is a major export and start to insert themselves (assuming they have not already).

There are widespread reports about how foreign actors (not limited to China) have infiltrated critical networks across many industries in the US en masse and are simply waiting for the right time to exploit them. Frontier models are simply another attack vector (and much more easily exploitable when you think about it).

The fact is that there is potential for this with any cloud-hosted model, whether it is intentional by the actual company building the models or a malicious actor is able to exploit a vulnerability.

This is a risk although then this is fortunately a model that isn't tied to Chinese hosting. But indeed something to consider if using straight DeepSeek.com.

I'm not important enough for anyone in China to go out of their way to attack me. And DeepSeek has to maintain a sufficient level of trust so that users keep using their platform--they can't just act like a keylogger attacking everyone's crypto wallets or trust collapses.

If I was working on something that the Chinese government considered of strategic importance, then I would certainly be worried about it. But I don't do that.

I'm much more worried about techbros in this country using their LLMs to extensively profile me and produce something vastly more dystopian in this country than the real or imagined social credit scores in China. The people trying to convince you that the Chinese government are the people you should be worried about (as an individual in the United States) are probably the people you really need to be worried about.

User data integrity definitely should be a concern. It's also known that regulations is being outpaced, so the cost of being/using frontier products is a double-edged sword for sure.

More likely? US tech leaders have been fully capitulating to the surveillance state for over a decade. Why do I care what China does with my data? I don’t live in China and never plan to.

The tech bro threat model has always been pure jingoism and xenophobia. Ironically, the worst thing a Chinese company has done with my data is sell Tiktok to an American technofascist.

Small team, cheap electricity, very efficient models. Many western companies operate at a loss to gain market share. Why can't the Chinese?

Inference is cheap. I bet the financials of these Chinese companies are much saner looking than any of the big US AI companies which are bloated by investors.

DeepSeek hasn't raised enough money to be actively selling tokens at a loss. They have a small team, extremely low overhead relative to other labs, operate in a place with the essentially the cheapest commercial electricity rates in the world, and their architecture lends itself very well to cheap inference.

If you think heavily subsidizing AI models isn’t financially viable, I have some bad news for you about US AI companies.

Deepseek has made some incredible advancements in model efficiency, and more importantly actually publishes those advancements so everyone can benefit from them.

Federal ban incoming then. They did it with cars already.

Maybe not. I don't see how US inference providers can compete anyway with commoditized models. Costs are out of control here and the infrastructure is way worse.

For sure. But also they’re building an electrostate with 100% electricity redundancy and dirt cheap electricity. They might actually be able to sustain this.

US suppliers are fine and won't go bankrupt, they can just focus on serving bigger "Pro" class models from their large datacenters. In fact cheap AI makes the bigger and smarter models more useful because it's smart enough to draft a clear question to the model, which helps minimize wasted tokens.

How would that be technically feasible? Would we get IP bans?

When they repeal the first amendment.

That was my experience with Claude code too. Someone will come and tell you you're doing it wrong. Hard to do it right when it'll just stop randomly, especially when it ends with something like 'let me know if you want me to continue!'.

They’re playing games behind the scenes to massage and manage their earnings.

China is gonna win long term there’s no doubt. The fact that the American firms haven’t created immense escape velocity despite the disparity in spending is quite telling.

Yep, I use Cortecs - https://cortecs.ai/ "Europe's LLM ROUTER"

Use it through Azure! Azure hosts DeepseekV4-Pro and DeepseekV4-Flash themselves. We're using it and it works great.

You don't get the discount that Deepseek is providing, but it's still a cheap model (v4-pro is cheaper than sonnet)

opencode allegedly has contractual no-data-retention policies with their providers.

I recall reading about that in an issue or in their Discord server.

But I would contact them formally to verify that.

I have been using deepseek via deepinfra, afaik they provide no data retention. Im probably going to deploy the full model on their infra instead of paying credits at some point, so far the experience has been pretty good

I've been using DeepSeek Flash to replace Sonnet once the subscription stopped working. Haven't really noticed a difference, although I don't usually have it doing anything very complicated.

That is probably why they were a few months delayed. But could be interesting to see their hosting / network / colocation setup.

I guess I got downvoted because people don't believe me that it's cheaper? But I spent $5 a couple days ago in one hour with deepseek v4 in a coding agent. That's way more expensive than a $20/month claude subscription. Even if I hit claude's 5h limit in one hour I can do that many times in a month.