Have you tried deepseek V4? It costs pennies and is as good as Opus 4.6 (I found 4.7 to be a downgrade, and cancelled my claude subscription before 4.8).
replyThe threshold has definitely been crossed.
It is not as good as Opus. I've tried to write Rust with it (and Codex for that matter), and it's awful.
replyIt was more like November. But it wasn’t really an inflection point, harnesses got good enough that people started noticing by the holiday break. And I’m not discounting some good ol’ stealth marketing in there as well.
replyDeepseek feels pretty close to Opus at this point, and it’s certainly useful enough for me to spend $20 on api tokens instead of four Claude max plans….