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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I am surprised by how good DeepSeek V4 Flash is. I use Claude Code and Codex on Claude 5 Opus and GPT-5.6 Sol most of the time, but when I use DS V4 Flash I don't feel like it's really that bad. And with oh-my-pi and just plain pi it's pretty good. To be honest the frontier models are much better at tool calling so in an assistant flow they're better but I did the dumb thing and optimized the harness for the model instead, rewriting the tools so they match what it guesses at, and DS V4 Flash does just fine.

The TTFT and tok/s are much higher on the small model so that makes it competitive for a bunch of things. It feels like what old Sonnet used to by the end of last year which is honestly damned good.

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I wrote my own OpenClaw one weekend and I am running it as my assistant through Matrix with DeepSeek v4 Flash (and Qwen). It probably costs me about 2 dollars a month and is even more useful than ChatGPT would be due to me having full control on what tools it has access to.

I can do things like take a photo of a doctor's note among add the appointment to my calendar, send a PDF to my archive tagged, OCR'd etc, search info from internet, look data from Google Maps.

I can even integrate this to home assistant and talk to my agent with my open source Alexa-like system.

Oddly enough, I did the exact same thing this past weekend, for a couple hundred usd in Fable overage.

It was truly remarkably easy to build and package it exactly to my whims, in my case as a single docker container with a process reaper that runs llama, my Go code, tts, chat harness, browser in xvfb, and even a mailer daemon. With Gemma, it even runs on a RPi 5.

What’s absolutely wild to me is that over a couple hours, I could probably have it import parts of Home Assistant for my devices directly, and do other wacky stuff in what is essentially software for one.

Funny. I use Fable a lot at work, but this one I paid from my own pocket and coded it with GLM 5.2.

Paid 20 euros in total.

Close to $500 in overage for me :) I’m going to give GLM a shot next.

Haha! Love to hear it. That's exactly what I have too: a claw-like[0] system which I originally used Sonnet for and now use my DeepSeek v4 Flash with.

In my case, I was foolish enough to run it all on my hardware which is pretty damned fast but has a duty cycle of 5% and runs idle most of the time. It's definitely better done via API.

Tell me more about the Alexa-like system! I have mine at home on a custom OpenWakeWord model trained on the word 'Aurora'. And I, too, have it hooked up to Home Assistant. I have a bunch of Eufy E21 baby cameras mounted on the walls[1] so it has vision through the house. The vision model uses GPT-5.5 on the subscription because I haven't yet set up a Qwen or Gemma multimodal that can see.

With Frigate on my home server I can even watch for events like my daughter waking up! And at night the agent sends out the vacuum if we've cleared the floor of baby toys. I feel this close to the dream of sci-fi AI. Because I auto-forward a bunch of my email to it etc. it knows about what's going on with me.

My wife will sometimes ask the agent information about me etc. and it's way easier to get a fast response rather than waiting for me to see the message etc.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538158

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo...

2: https://imgur.com/a/tP12lfj

Privacy is the main benefit of running it yourself. Sending all of your personal info to random providers on openrouter would worry me. I don't mind it for code but if it's connected to my calendar and personal data, I want it running on my machine.

I can't wait until good enough models can run on affordable hardware.

Nice setup. Which home assistant do you use? I would love to bring alexa like capability to my setup.

Like the others I just wrote a simple agentic loop that listens to telegram and acts with a timeout to check other things, and with a timer to run scheduled jobs on a cron.

EDIT: Oh, home assistant. I use Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/

I have these around the house:

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

Then you can set the background AI to be any OpenAI compatible API. So I just created one to my local Rust Agent, and connected it to home assistant. Now I can yell from the couch to create me a new Proxmox container with the next free static IP address etc. :D

This is very cool. I think I’ll get it instead of using my home built device (a respeaker attached to a low power machine). Looks like it supports custom wake words too. Thank you!

It’s funny how we converged on a similar system. My agent is also written in Rust.

Yes. I tested OpenClaw that burned 15€ just by starting it and I hated its configuration. Spent 20€ in tokens and built my own in a day, that does everything I want and sips tokens.

What a time to be alive.

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