You can use V4 Pro with Claude Code [1].
replyI tried it and it's impressive.
[1]: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
I'm working on a custom launcher for hooking up Claude Code with various providers (groups env variables in profiles) cause DeepSeek doesn't have vision and sometimes I need browser use with screenshots or Opus reasoning, for other tasks it's fine.
replyBasically: https://ccode.kronis.dev/
ccode --deepseek
Also turns out that with a local proxy you can get Remote Control working and see the DeepSeek sessions in the desktop app, screenshots on the page. Other than that, I'm happy that it works pretty well (in addition to something like OpenCode) and the discount is enough to make me consider going from Anthropic's Max subscription to Pro and using it only where DeepSeek is insufficient.
I am curious - Is there a way to switch between models depending on the task? Because I believe Deepseek V4 is not multimodal and it will be good to switch back to Claude if vision or other capabilities are required.
replyThat's interesting. I thought Claude Code is not as good, therefore people want to use Claude model with other alternatives. This is the other way around.
replyWhich begs the question, regardless of the model, which Claude Code alternative is better? (I keep saying "Claude Code alternative" because I don't know the term... LLM CLI?)
AFAIK the two most popular open source harnesses right now are OpenCode and Pi. They take a pretty different approach, OpenCode includes a lot of features while Pi is very minimal by design and focused on extensibility, to the point where many people are just asking Pi to write a plugin for itself whenever they want it to have a new feature. I personally like Pi's philosophy more and I think its developer justified the choices really well in his blog post:
replyhttps://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/#to...
The common term for a tool that wraps an LLM with a workflow is “harness”.
replydeleted
replySurprised Anthropic hasn't done anything to restrict Claude Code from using other providers.
replyThe value of Claude Code the harness isn't that great. There's a lot of other good harnesses out there.
replyI thought so, and then I tried Opencode and Codex and started to appreciate Claude Code a lot more. They've actually done great work the small details.
replyWhat’s your favourite harness? Is there any benchmarks for harness like LLMs have for swe verified?
replyGood or better? Curious which would be in either bucket.
replyProbably a matter of taste. I prefer the harness I wrote, I don't want to go near Anthropic's bloated mess of a harness with a 10-meter pole.
replyAnd it gets dragged down by Anthropic actively injecting unhelpful things into prompts without telling users about them (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/58262).
replyAt this point in the AI wars, it is probably better to have more users of Claude code rather than restrict which LLMs it can connect to. Claude code is probably (currently at least) stickier than the LLM model itself. Getting people into the Claude code ecosystem is worth it.
replyLater, they can always lock it down more or add Claude LLM only features to it.
It works very well with OpenCode. My team keeps hitting the 5h limits on other subscriptions and it's pretty good to have Deepseek as a backup. I just put 50 bucks on there and it feels like it'll never run out.
replyIt's not good enough to fully replace any of the frontier models yet but it's definitely great to have as a backup!
Why do you need them to provide a coding agent? Just use their model with any off the shelf coding agent. I happen to prefer Pi, but use whatever works for you.
replyI probably have an unfounded assumption that whatever coding agent they make will work really well with their models, better than external harnesses. I don't have a good sense for how all the model + harness combinations compare, nor any good way to compare them myself, but generally believe model companies train their models to work best with their own harness.
replyI've noticed that models have gotten less finicky with this over time. Harnesses don't need to be complex to get good coding performance from models, they just need to implement some sane primitives for code exploration and editing.
replyYeah, I'm using Pi with their models through an OpenCode Go subscription and it works pretty well. 10 bucks and V4-Flash is virtually infinite.
replyRL with the harness inputs and outputs of users is one of the primary improvers of model performance, a self perpetuating flywheel.
replyWhat's the best way to use it with Pi, OpenRouter?
replyAll the major coding agents already support DeepSeek.
replyYou no longer need "their coding agent". You can hook up claude code to use Deepseek. Works perfectly.
replyantirez's ds4-agent works quite fine. It runs on any Apple Silicon device with 96GB RAM or more.
replyopen code works with them today. I've been using it fulltime for 2 weeks so far.
replyUsing it with Pi and can only report good thing so far. I'm very impressed by how good it is (also it's way slower than Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and often thinks "too much" before starting).
reply