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