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Comment by ammar_x | Hacker News Reader

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...

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

Also turns out that with a local proxy you can get Remote Control working and see the DeepSeek sessions in the desktop app, screenshots on the page. Other than that, I'm happy that it works pretty well and the discount is enough to make me consider going from Anthropic's Max subscription to Pro and using it only where DeepSeek is insufficient. With that proxy I eventually hope to be able to transparently switch models mid-task, if I need Opus for like 5 turns or something.

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/

I've been using V4 flash consistently with Claude. Pretty great fast and darn cheap. I use it about 3h/day and so far haven't crossed $1 USD/week.

FWIW, I this is what I have in my settings.json

  "env": {
    "ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN":"sk-nope_not_real",   
    "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL": "https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic",
    "ANTHROPIC_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
    "ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC": "1",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_EFFORT_LEVEL": "low",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_ADAPTIVE_THINKING": "1",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_THINKING": "0",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_AWAY_SUMMARY": "0",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL": "deepseek-v4-flash",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "8000",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_FILE_READ_MAX_OUTPUT_TOKENS": "4000",
    "BASH_MAX_OUTPUT_LENGTH": "20000",
    "CLAUDE_AUTOCOMPACT_PCT_OVERRIDE": "60",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW": "200000",
    "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_GIT_INSTRUCTIONS": "1"
  }

Why not use higher thinking effort?

Just cause that level seems to be working fine for me and it's usually faster.

Hi, is it comparable to Opus?

V4 Pro is between Sonnet and Opus. But it is cheap. Slow but very cheap. Very diligent.

I run a proxy that allows me switching back to Opus when necessary.

Deepseek isn't like Z.ai which is bit cheaper only on the surface. Or like Qwen 3.7 Max which is Opus-level but very expensive.

Deepseek is my favorite since V3 but V4 is definitely catch-up to newer Anthropic models

3h/day and how many parallel agents? 1/3/10?

I think out tokens would be a better metric.

Max 2 parallel agents, usually.

As for out tokens, it's about 200k/day

thank you so much for sharing ir

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.

It is still more expensive per-request than the common Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions, but the math changes a lot based on your specific use case. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...

But as usual, there are far cheaper subscriptions with higher limits than Anthropic and OpenAI, that also provide DeepSeek v4 Pro. So you should use those subscriptions first until you max them out, then look at a different subscription.

I don’t even use Claude that much and was hitting limits in the 20$ using sonnet, I’ve deposited 5$ with deepseek and haven’t hit the limit after spending 60million+ tokens. So no way it’s more expensive.

The link you shared is just a large table of data, which is hard to browse on a phone.

Could you please elaborate on the far cheaper subscriptions that we should be using?

I've been using it pretty extensively over a month and I'm at maybe $7. It thinks for quite a while, but the results have been better than Sonnet for me.

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 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.

I was looking into something similar because I wanted to test a local model for doing basic coding and smart model (deepseek) for planning.

It's basically not possible with claude code, the api endpoint is a single environment variable and whatever models are on that endpoint are what's available.

HOWEVER, if you run a proxy like LiteLLM, you can configure it to send requests to different api endpoints on the back end and expose them as different "models" on the front end, then configure claude code to switch between those virtual models.

Found this: https://github.com/farion1231/cc-switch

It allows for switching models in Claude Code.

Right that says it has a proxy feature so it can probably do what I was describing with LiteLLM

Check out the project called superpowers. It can use different models for different agents. I use it witb opencode to have different models for reaearch, planning, execution, testing etc

i've been trying that, in reality every time you try to save it, it's not worth it, the cost of mistake is so high , you can spent 2-3h on just wrong assumption, you lost your time and all the burned tokens.

There is a tool called deepclaude, which runs a proxy in the background capable of doing this, by simply doing /model in Claude.

It seems you can use the Claude Code CLI harness without a Claude Pro subscription now, which I don't think you could a before?

I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.

The npm install of Claude Code deprecated, since Feb 2026.

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

At this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it.

Later, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.

The value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.

Good or better? Curious which would be in either bucket.

Probably a matter of taste. I prefer the harness I wrote, I don't want to go near Anthropic's bloated mess of a harness with a 10-meter pole.

What’s your favourite harness? Is there any benchmarks for harness like LLMs have for swe verified?

You can check my profile for which one I like most :) I do think there have been efforts to benchmark different harnesses.

Personally I'm not going to choose one harness or another based on +/- a few percentage points in a benchmark. I'm going to use one the one that I find the most ergonomic, that isn't too bloated, etc. The models are the primary lever, not the harness.

There Seen to be more and more harness benchmarks out there, pretty interesting read:

https://neuralnoise.com/2026/harness-bench-wip/

And it gets dragged down by Anthropic actively injecting unhelpful things into prompts without telling users about them (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262).

I thought so, and then I tried Opencode and Codex and started to appreciate Claude Code a lot more. They've actually done great work with the small details.

I actually have't looked back since trying opencode The ability to properly see what the agent is doing in tool calls and subagents is really unmatched, CC strips all reasoning and return values, only displaying tool calls, and you're unable to expand a single subagent, it's expand everything and scroll endlessly or show everything collapsed with basically no info at all (read x files, ran x commands) Just seems like extremely basic features are missing

It went the other way, you can't use other harnesses to connect to the cheaper versions of Claude. So clearly they think their current moat is Claude Code use, not the LLM itself.

IMHO the ergonomics of their tooling are not great. I'd rather use Codex or even OpenCode. Configuration alone is very arcane with lacking documentation. Sandboxing/permission system is quite confusing too.

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?)

The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.

AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post:

https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to... (the pi-coding-agent section)

Author blocks referrals from HN, weirdly dramatic, especially considering they have 1086 karma here. I wonder what we did to them.

Oh damn, I haven't noticed because my browser removes the referer header. But I think the image on the block page is a pretty good answer to why he did that.

What's the image trying to convey? Genuine question, I just come here to read nerd stuff and I'm not aware of any controversy

The image shows Garry Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator. He has lately been on a huge AI psychosis streak, bragging about things like "shipping 37000 lines of code every day" and "using Claude Code so much it burned out his USB-C power connectors". He's in a lobster suit because he's talking about OpenClaw, an AI agent assistant which those same AI psychosis types lean into too much by giving it full read-write access to all their life and then getting surprised when it accidentally deletes all of their emails.

Pi's developer is obviously not anti-AI, and he definitely doesn't hate OpenClaw, since it's based on Pi. But there's a growing number of people who take those things too far, and a lot of them are on HN. You can easily find them in the comments of any AI-related post here. I assume that's the type of people the image is portraying.

Thank you for the explanation!

I love oh-my-pi, but I'm not sure if it's "better". Maybe just as good.

I use DeepSeek v4 flash with CoPilot and it works pretty good.

I've seen good results with opencode connected to glm 5.1 on ollama cloud... for $20 a month you get similar performance that you get with opus 4.7

I'm my experience claude code is kind of shit.

Pi works very well with deepseek though

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