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Comment by reconnecting | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure DeepSeek isn't the point here. You can change the name to whatever you prefer and the article still holds.

Actually, I think the author put DeepSeek on purpose to avoid the obvious ChatGPT/Claude comparison — because whatever he chose, there would be a question of why model A and not B, while the point of the article isn't about models comparison at all.

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It is the point. Also open source model enthusiast tell you otherwise, there is a coding quality gap between these models. If I use DeepSeek, I do so knowing that I have to limit to simpler tasks on smaller, well specified prompts. What the author did, letting the model do the planning, is not something DeepSeek will excel at. I'm using GPT (Terra, Sol, Luna), Claude (Opus 5, Fable), Qwen 3.8 and GLM 5.3 Flash daily and have to vary which model I use where because there's a huge intelligence step function difference here. That's why this article is so useless:

Imagine someone trying to make the case that riding bicycles is a terrible experience and their whole argument is that they took a random cheapo bike with flat tires and rode it for 3min and that wasn't fun. Sure, but if you buy a 25k carbon bike you will have a different experience. I'd not trust that person. If someone told me they have 10 bikes they ride daily and can explain the differences, in detail, between their bikes, and what they excel at. I'd trust that person's opinion.

Excellent analogy. This paragraph invalidates the entire post and honestly just looks lazy. The author may be right anyway, but with that level of experience with these tools, he is really just guessing.

There’s a night-and-day difference between frontier and budget models, no question. But the issue isn't the tooling at all : if you put someone who doesn't know the rules of the road on a $15k carbon road bike, they're just gonna slam into a telephone pole at 30 mph instead of 6 mph

Maybe the failure is in trying only one model / one prompt.

Right. Better throw money at 5 different ones and then people come and tell you that you just need MORE agents and throw MORE money at it or you're not doing it right.

I am convinced coding agent makes me extra productive.

I'm also convinced the effect would not be there If I had a 10$ budget.

> I'm also convinced the effect would not be there If I had a 10$ budget.

Sure it would be. I pay $10/month to OpenCode for a Go subscription, it's fine for day-to-day coding tasks. I wouldn't necessarily try and one-shot a production app on that budget, but with decent planning and test-driven-development, it gets the job done

The cheapest coding subscription is $20 and you can get a refund if you cancel within 7 days.

Actually, I lied, Codex is free and I developed my first AI written application using it and the free tier limits were generous enough to work on it for several months.

Hey! I'm building www.freepi.ai which is free! So you can also try that!

I think the point is that $10 isn’t exactly a lot of money to put where your mouth is, nor a serious effort to see if it works.

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