It seems like any project that makes fun of Claude is bound to reach the top spot on Hacker News. Even if it’s just a project consisting of four lines of code.
I don't always copy paste vibe coded project readme mds into Claude code and ask them to rewrite it but when I do... actually that's all I do now because my goal in life is to make wealthy overvalued companies wealthier.
There probably isn't a point. Someone didn't understand something, didn't research it, so they 1 shotted their first thought and sent it to the front page of HN and all of their socials. It's the future bruh
I'm curious how well it actually works. I tried Deepseek with Hermes and Opencode and it seemed extremely bad about using some of the basic tools given, like the Hermes holographic memory tools, even with system prompt instructions strongly pointing them out.
If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
agreed. OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness. my sideproject mouse.dev I’ve been combining parts from OpenCode, Claude Code, and Hermes to build a cloud agent architecture that works well from mobile.
I haven’t run formal evals but i improved the experience for my own needs and it feels noticeably better with these modifications.
-Claude-style subagents
-an MCP layer for higher-level tools
-Cursor-style control plane modes like Ask, Plan, Debug, and Build.
The MCP layer lets the harness use things like GitHub file/code read, PR creation, web search/fetch, structured user questions, plan-mode switching, user skills, and subagents.
So the improvement is mostly from better ui/ux orchestration and tool access. There's some things from hermes that are interesting as well.
Most of my focus has been on applying this stack to sandboxed cloud agents so you can properly code and work from mobile devices.
I can't definitively say that the stack is better or worse than Claude code, more just tuned for my use case I guess.
Looked into this one. Thought it was suspicious that it only had 7 open issues on github. Turns out they have a bot that auto-closes every single issue just because.
Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
If you're okay with sonnet level performance, this sounds like a straight upgrade. But I find that sonnet messes up too much, that it ends up not being worth cost optimizing down to using it or another sonnet-level model. Glad to have this as an option though
Like me: that’s what I do. Either Opus 4.7 or GLM 5.1 for planning, write it out to a markdown file, then farm it out to Qwen 3.6 27B on my DGX Spark-alike using Pi. Works amusingly well all things considered.
It's surprisingly good. Beats MiniMax 2.7 and Qwen 3.5 Plus in my testing (I haven't tested 3.6 plus though), quite handily. It's far better than Sonnet, and often equivalent to Opus for the web development and OCaml tasks I'm using it for. It definitely isn't Opus 4.7, but its far good enough to earn it's keep and is substantially cheaper.
I agree with this. And also: it uses more thinking time to reach this. So while you get a lot of tokens on their plan, the peak 3x token usage multiplier + the extra thinking means you run into the rate limit anyways.
True, though the $20 equivalent used for planning only I don’t hit those limits often, vs Claude where the Pro can literally hit limits with a single prompt haha
Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies
It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU
Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!
I keep re-learning this lesson: I chug along with a lesser model then throw a problem at it that's too complex. Then I try different models until I give up and bring in Opus 4.6 to clean up.
I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
Unless I actually know the author I assume everything here is vibeslop and full of mistakes.
Maybe I need to switch to some news publication that actually does real research and writing still. Because public forums like this have been completely destroyed by LLMs.
welp, pack it it in boys, it was nice conceptualizing all you as real humans on the internet. I guess I'll just have to go touch grass if I want to feel parasocial.
I mean, we have the tech and community to actually build in person meetups and sign CRT certificates, right?
If we touch grass in person and swap certificate requests, we can actually rebuild a trust network.
This is a pretty old problem with regards to clubs / secret societies and whatnot. And with certificates / PKI, our modern security tools have solved all the technical problems.
Unfortunately, a lot of whats happening in the tech world seems to be from some super serious AI cults, so not sure goin offline like this is any better.
Yea but we could have fun. Play some dnd. Drink tea or whiskey. Eat pizza pie. Light saber battle. Buy a megaphone and hang out at a street corner telling passerbys they are perfectly acceptable and worthy of kindness and love
This has become a problem for me. I like trying new things. But I also know that in about a week, there's going to be a better/cheaper setup. And a week after that. And ideally I'd like to get some coding done when I'm not tinkering with the tools.
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://openrouter.ai/api" ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$OPENROUTER_API_KEY" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash" CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 claude
This repo's README explains how it works and you can do it yourself. claude looks for environment variables that say which API endpoint to talk to, which key to pass, which model name to use for haiku/sonnet/opus-level workloads, etc.
Coding harnesses make a big difference, and OpenCode is notably less effective than Claude Code (1) in my experience, (2) with the models I've tried it on. (I've not yet tried it with DSv4.)
I like being able to add a wide array of models, define perms for agents and subagents, turn MCPs on and off at will, and be able to fix bugs I find in it.
Also opencode tracks you by default. Its not safe. Every first prompt you send is routed through their servers, logged and they can use your data however they want
anthropic messed up big time harness works with any muh commodity LLM, meanwhile VCs were duped on the myth of FOOM AGI, probably not a cooincidence Anthropic is enmeshed with the scifi fan fic forum known as lesswrong. The world wants useful tools. The bay area bubble in contrast thrives on Mythos.
I think OAI and Anthropic will be ok for a year or two. But after that If they still continue to earn revenues from selling tokens to firms/software engineers they will be in serious trouble.
The American firms are not demonstrating escape velocity and as long as china offers something somewhat comparable and offers it at a very low price to compensate for any difference in quality, they will not be generating enough in cash flows to finance reinvestment. I highly doubt they’ll be able to continue raising external financing for numerous periods from here on out - they gotta start showing strong financials and that they are running away from the open source models.
I wouldnt put it past the US gov to ban foreign models. they tried to ban tiktok. what is being demosrrated here is silicon valley can not withstand a competitive market.
It seems like any project that makes fun of Claude is bound to reach the top spot on Hacker News. Even if it’s just a project consisting of four lines of code.
This in essence is what allows one to use any model with CC -- including local.
The AI wars have begun
I'm not exactly sure what the point of this is. Deepseek already has instructions to use its API with many CLI's including Claude Code directly:
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
From vibe coders for vibe coders
I don't always copy paste vibe coded project readme mds into Claude code and ask them to rewrite it but when I do... actually that's all I do now because my goal in life is to make wealthy overvalued companies wealthier.
I thought the tool format wasnt exactly the same ? So plugging any IA into claude code requires a conversion of format
DeepSeek has a dedicated Anthropic-compatible endpoint [1].
[1] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api
Many of them expose “anthropic-compatible” APIs for this very purpose.
There probably isn't a point. Someone didn't understand something, didn't research it, so they 1 shotted their first thought and sent it to the front page of HN and all of their socials. It's the future bruh
I'm curious how well it actually works. I tried Deepseek with Hermes and Opencode and it seemed extremely bad about using some of the basic tools given, like the Hermes holographic memory tools, even with system prompt instructions strongly pointing them out.
If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
I’m going to throw my harness in the ring: https://codeberg.org/mlow/lmcli
agreed. OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness. my sideproject mouse.dev I’ve been combining parts from OpenCode, Claude Code, and Hermes to build a cloud agent architecture that works well from mobile.
> OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness.
I personally didn't find it to be competitve with Claude Code as a harness. Can I ask how you modified it to perform better?
I haven’t run formal evals but i improved the experience for my own needs and it feels noticeably better with these modifications.
-Claude-style subagents -an MCP layer for higher-level tools -Cursor-style control plane modes like Ask, Plan, Debug, and Build.
The MCP layer lets the harness use things like GitHub file/code read, PR creation, web search/fetch, structured user questions, plan-mode switching, user skills, and subagents.
So the improvement is mostly from better ui/ux orchestration and tool access. There's some things from hermes that are interesting as well.
Most of my focus has been on applying this stack to sandboxed cloud agents so you can properly code and work from mobile devices.
I can't definitively say that the stack is better or worse than Claude code, more just tuned for my use case I guess.
> I would first suggest looking into pi.dev
Looked into this one. Thought it was suspicious that it only had 7 open issues on github. Turns out they have a bot that auto-closes every single issue just because.
I honestly have no words.
The idea is for it to he extremely minimal which strikes me as a very opinionated stance, and not opinions I agree with.
Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
definitely worth it - have both ollama cloud, opencode and hermes running to test them all out, working great so far.
If you're okay with sonnet level performance, this sounds like a straight upgrade. But I find that sonnet messes up too much, that it ends up not being worth cost optimizing down to using it or another sonnet-level model. Glad to have this as an option though
A lot of people are having good experiences doing things like using opus for designing and using locally hosted qwen3.6 for implementation.
I could see a serious cost reduction story by using opus for design and deepseek for implementation.
Personally I would avoid anthropic entirely. But I get why people don't.
Like me: that’s what I do. Either Opus 4.7 or GLM 5.1 for planning, write it out to a markdown file, then farm it out to Qwen 3.6 27B on my DGX Spark-alike using Pi. Works amusingly well all things considered.
How is glm 5.1? I have t tried it yet but have been meaning too
It's surprisingly good. Beats MiniMax 2.7 and Qwen 3.5 Plus in my testing (I haven't tested 3.6 plus though), quite handily. It's far better than Sonnet, and often equivalent to Opus for the web development and OCaml tasks I'm using it for. It definitely isn't Opus 4.7, but its far good enough to earn it's keep and is substantially cheaper.
I agree with this. And also: it uses more thinking time to reach this. So while you get a lot of tokens on their plan, the peak 3x token usage multiplier + the extra thinking means you run into the rate limit anyways.
True, though the $20 equivalent used for planning only I don’t hit those limits often, vs Claude where the Pro can literally hit limits with a single prompt haha
What hardware are you using to power this?
> DGX Spark-alike
Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies
It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU
Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!
I heavily considered one of the AMD Strix Halo boxes, but part of the reason I wanted this was to learn CUDA :)
I keep re-learning this lesson: I chug along with a lesser model then throw a problem at it that's too complex. Then I try different models until I give up and bring in Opus 4.6 to clean up.
And I keep using Opus to like, make git commits. Really just need a smart router that is actually smart, vs having to micromanage model
I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
You might be surprised then at how good cheaper models solve your problems
Did... Did you just ask an AI to one-shot something that normally amounts to no more than setting two env variables?
obviously vibe coded ( co authored ) + the prices dont even match
It's going to be real hard to find headlines that weren't vibe coded from here on out unfortunately.
Unless I actually know the author I assume everything here is vibeslop and full of mistakes.
Maybe I need to switch to some news publication that actually does real research and writing still. Because public forums like this have been completely destroyed by LLMs.
welp, pack it it in boys, it was nice conceptualizing all you as real humans on the internet. I guess I'll just have to go touch grass if I want to feel parasocial.
I mean, we have the tech and community to actually build in person meetups and sign CRT certificates, right?
If we touch grass in person and swap certificate requests, we can actually rebuild a trust network.
This is a pretty old problem with regards to clubs / secret societies and whatnot. And with certificates / PKI, our modern security tools have solved all the technical problems.
I wish I could be invited to a secret club of guaranteed humans. Someone hand me a certificate next time you see me! Also don't stab me kthxbye
Unfortunately, a lot of whats happening in the tech world seems to be from some super serious AI cults, so not sure goin offline like this is any better.
Yea but we could have fun. Play some dnd. Drink tea or whiskey. Eat pizza pie. Light saber battle. Buy a megaphone and hang out at a street corner telling passerbys they are perfectly acceptable and worthy of kindness and love
poorly vibe coded. machines can check details easily, use them.
This has become a problem for me. I like trying new things. But I also know that in about a week, there's going to be a better/cheaper setup. And a week after that. And ideally I'd like to get some coding done when I'm not tinkering with the tools.
So I think I'll stay with CC for now.
Is there a way to do this directly by using claudecode CLI (which I already have installed) and openrouter??
Yes, Deepseek even documents how:
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
Yes, from Claude Code themselves: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway
Here's a oneliner:
This repo's README explains how it works and you can do it yourself. claude looks for environment variables that say which API endpoint to talk to, which key to pass, which model name to use for haiku/sonnet/opus-level workloads, etc.
the wrapper is basically env var glue. You’re still betting the whole loop on Anthropic's closed client.
Cost engineering [1] will be the next hot topic for AI.
[1] A fancier way of saying "reducing cost."
layer on layer on layer to refactor bunch of lines xD
I had a call with our CTO and we are pivoting away from Claude Code to DeepClaude because the cost savings are too substantial to ignore.
Oh shoot now the next CC upgrade will blow your subscription for doing this
Why wouldn't you use something open source like OpenCode, which already support DSv4 and has more features than CC?
Coding harnesses make a big difference, and OpenCode is notably less effective than Claude Code (1) in my experience, (2) with the models I've tried it on. (I've not yet tried it with DSv4.)
As someone who does use other models with CC, I am curious about opencode, what extra features does it have that you find essential?
I like being able to add a wide array of models, define perms for agents and subagents, turn MCPs on and off at will, and be able to fix bugs I find in it.
fair enough...any drawbacks that you've found?
Its UI isn't as slick, and it has bugs, but so does CC and you can submit a PR to have them fixed in OC.
More features than CC ?
Also opencode tracks you by default. Its not safe. Every first prompt you send is routed through their servers, logged and they can use your data however they want
I thought this was debunked awhile ago. ?
I could not find any evidence of prompt logging. The code is open; can you point me to it?
anthropic messed up big time harness works with any muh commodity LLM, meanwhile VCs were duped on the myth of FOOM AGI, probably not a cooincidence Anthropic is enmeshed with the scifi fan fic forum known as lesswrong. The world wants useful tools. The bay area bubble in contrast thrives on Mythos.
I think OAI and Anthropic will be ok for a year or two. But after that If they still continue to earn revenues from selling tokens to firms/software engineers they will be in serious trouble.
The American firms are not demonstrating escape velocity and as long as china offers something somewhat comparable and offers it at a very low price to compensate for any difference in quality, they will not be generating enough in cash flows to finance reinvestment. I highly doubt they’ll be able to continue raising external financing for numerous periods from here on out - they gotta start showing strong financials and that they are running away from the open source models.
The performance gap will likely close as Chinese hardware improves. This is happening very rapidly.
Already DeepSeek v4 is being hosted on Huawei Ascend 950. What do you think those cost relative to NVIDIA gear?
I wouldnt put it past the US gov to ban foreign models. they tried to ban tiktok. what is being demosrrated here is silicon valley can not withstand a competitive market.
Good luck banning Open Source models.
Not only that but other countries are very unlikely to follow suit, so it is just a straight-up productivity tax on the US.