DeepSeek

What hackers pick instead

• Claude OpusRecommended as a top coding model that fixes bugs and ships features with fewer mistakes than earlier LLMs, though critics cite weak architecture choices, usage limits and confident errors.3331recommend
• OpenAI GPTRecommended for strong coding, debugging and research help with good reasoning and token efficiency, though critics cite hallucinations, overcomplication, verbose output and high cost.1205recommend
• Claude SonnetA capable coding model that has improved noticeably with each version and is faster and cheaper than Opus, though it needs careful supervision and usage limits bite.854recommend
• DeepSeek V4 FlashA very cheap, fast model that people find close to frontier quality for coding and everyday tasks; critics say it errs more, loops, and needs steering.828recommend
• FableRecommended as a top coding model for hard, long-running tasks and large refactors, though critics cite over-engineered code, costly usage limits and safety guards that switch models mid-task.823recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1189 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Any random startup can buy a fleet of GPUs for a few million and serve DeepSeek/GLM that are 85% as good as what OpenAI and Anthropic are spending hundreds of billions to accomplish.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Apple to Skip High-End M6 Mac Chips in Favor of AI-Focused M7 Line”

2. I switched to DeepSeek entirely once I decided to put 10 bucks on it and I realized that it could do whatever I was throwing at Claude or ChatGPT prior to that.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index”

3. several Chinese models (at least Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM) are "close enough" that with the right harness they are cost effective alternatives

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Uber's $1,500/Month AI Limit Is a Useful Signal for AI Tool Pricing”

4. I just had claude teach me how to use it, and then tested it on the same example, which it got right, and for which it charged next to nothing.

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: Mining Scientific Papers”

5. The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5”

6. Chinese models cost a fraction of the price, and as someone who has been using DeepSeek and MiMo, they are nothing short of excellent.

   Recommends · Jul 2026

7. I've been using the deepseek api (not for coding though) and have been getting great results and it's so cheap it may as well be free.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “The US Is Winning the AI Race”

8. If true, would that sort of explain why Chinese Models score high on benchmarks, but not quite as capable when given real tasks?

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026”

9. It took me around 15 minutes and a few dimes worth of DeepSeek tokens to upgrade some gnarly, janky, exploitable PHP 7.x code

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Is this the new cyber normal?”

10. if you combine the latest DeepSeek model with any good coding harness the results are surprisingly comparable to Claude Code

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “DeepSeek V4: The Open-Source Model Frontier Labs Feared”

11. I am having some great experience with DeepSeek. In fact, it seems to perform better than Claude or Codex in my use case.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Claude Opus 4.8”

12. Even Deepseek, which was and is revolutionary, was not useful for independent code commits longer than a few dozen lines.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI”

13. a cheap and efficient model that's still somewhat competitive and that's exactly the niche DeepSeek fulfills the best

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Model”

14. open-weight LLMs like DeepSeek that prove the cost of running inference with near-frontier models can be very cheap

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. To Find a Major Software Flaw”

15. they are very open (not just weights). A young company and very much unlike Chinese Big Tech and American Big Tech.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race”

16. which didn't have the same limitations as American models, especially being open weight means you can fine tune it

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Good Riddance, 4o”

17. Qwen, deepseek and other Chinese models are known for their 10x or even better efficiency compared to Anthropic's.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “No, it doesn't cost Anthropic $5k per Claude Code user”

18. a huge downside of Chinese-models is that these are chinese models with tianmen square and tibet and other issues

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Anthropic announces proof of distillation at scale by MiniMax, DeepSeek,Moonshot”

19. A committee of good-not-great models (DeepSeek, MiMo, Gemma 4) cannot replicate the accuracy of Opus by itself.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation”

20. DeepSeek and Moonshot have been very consistent with open weights as well as sharing actually detailed research

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “DeepSeek-V4-Flash Update”

21. Deepseek,qwen,kimi, etc all have fundamental research making the models smaller, more efficient, scalable, etc.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing”

22. Deepseek is great enough for most use cases (like implementation) and prices are off by an order of magnitude?

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users”

23. Deepseek is awesome for home projects, I have used it quite a bit and the 10 bucks I loaded is yet to run out.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “US holds off blacklisting China's DeepSeek, +100 firms deemed security risks”

24. budget alternatives from the families of DeepSeek, Kimi, GPT, MiniMax, etc. which are very much Sonnet grade

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?”

25. they also often publish their methodology in detailed scholarly publications that are themselves open-access

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing”

26. at least on some benchmarks DeepSeek performs as well and of course the cost is an order of magnitude less.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Sonnet 5.5”

27. I love DS and am not looking back. For Elixir, not a lot of models are good, but DS just blazes through it.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017”

28. For chatbot-style usage maybe , can't really attest to that; for long-running, long-context "agentic" work including planning, within a harness etc., definitely not (yet).

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order”

29. This is a risk although then this is fortunately a model that isn't tied to Chinese hosting. But indeed something to consider if using straight DeepSeek.com.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent”

30. giving your data to a non-deterministic program written by a geopolitical rival that has a long history of malicious intrusion on Western networks

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order”

31. Not recognizing they were outputting wrongthink until after it was being streamed to the user is a known behavior with some Chinese chatbot apps.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “OpenAI uncovers Chinese intimidation operation through official's use of ChatGPT”

32. if you ask deepseek to deviate from the CCP stance that "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China that is in rebellion", it will become incoherent

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Why agents matter more than other AI”

33. hasty retrofitted layer of censorship, where Deepseek would actually show you an answer and then right in front of your eyes would replace it

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model”

34. Deepseek won't even discuss Taiwan's telephone code with me, because doing so activates the forbidden knowledge that Taiwan is a country.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “The OnlyFans Economy of American AI”

35. in deepseek, even asking for bibliography of prominent Marxist scholars (Cheng Enfu) i see text generated then quickly deleted

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Qwen3-Max-Thinking”

36. Deepseek servers are CCP servers, there is no functional difference or any form of friction to keep the government "in check"

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent”

37. every agent I've tried through Claude code (including deepseek and GLM) will actively try to avoid fixing pre-existing issues

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable”

38. The chances of my bank account getting hacked due to the PLA backdoor in Deepseek is higher than the CIA backdoor in OpenAI.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “DeepSeek v4”

39. Deepseek servers are CCP servers, there is no functional difference or any form of friction to keep the government in check

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent”

40. I tried DeepSeek agent to get answers from Chinese models on some tough questions regarding Chinese govt and it refused

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing”