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DeepSeek competes with Sonnet, not significantly worse or better. It tends to do weird things in codebases on the bigger side.

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At $3/$15, Sonnet is more than an order of magnitude more expensive than DeepSeek at $0.435/$0.87 (with cached input pricing of $0.003625, DeepSeek is very good at caching, so it's very cheap to use). So, if they're equal in performance, DeepSeek is ten times better value.

But, from what I can tell DeepSeek is better than Sonnet, though I agree it is not at the level of current Opus or GPT 5.5 (but I think it probably beats Gemini Pro 3.1). I use the best model I can for code, because the cost of weaker performance is more than the $100/month I pay for Claude Opus, but it's worth knowing there are very cheap, very good, models for stuff I want to do that isn't Claude Code.

I think there are so many variables from harnesses to tasks, making it very hard to put the models to a pecking order unless one beats another in virtually every task (like in Opus vs DeepSeek).

But all in all, I don't think we disagree.

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