Same. And I have come to use OMP (oh my pi) agent /advisor mode to put a 2nd model on the case (also mid-size one), reading everything. It can not block anything or change anything - just inserts comments in the text stream with 1 turn delay. Good portion of the time it's quiet. I'd say 1/2 of the time it's got something to say. About 2/3-rd of that the 'advice' is insubstantial or about something not-quite wrong. The good thing is the main model is confident - checks and then it stands its ground. Have not noticed it turning a right into a wrong b/c of advisor false alarm. And in 1/3-rd of the advice, it's a genuine defect teh advisor noticed, the main model works out a fix. This is my approximate feeling just observing the process, have not got collected the data. Afaik only OMP has advisor mode. Agent pi has plugin pi-omplike-advisor. For agent Hermes I had them code me an /advisor plugin (for now -0.1 old v0.18.x; yet to upgrade it to latest).
replyThe problem is picking between models. I do not want to spend my time switching models and trying to decipher which model should be used for what. Maybe that's just a me problem that I need to figure out.
replyDeepSeek v4 is honestly good enough that I'm fine throwing it at everything in my hobby projects. I guess now I'll be switching from V4 Pro-Preview to V4 Flash. My only real complaint is that they can't do images, which limits their ability to autonomously debug some kinds of issues
replyOf course you can get more bang for your buck by being more deliberate. But that's equally true with US frontier models. You can optimize your work by choosing between Opus, Fable, Sonnet, Sol, Luna and Terra for each task. Some people seem to prefer to let Opus code and Sol review, for example. And then there is the whole debate whether $current_version is actually better (Some people stay on Claude 4.8 because they dislike how 5.0 is sometimes doing stupid things, just as many opted out of dynamic reasoning when they still could)
CodeWhale is a coding agent that auto-routes requests to Flash / Pro based on complexity, as determined by Flash. It's also tuned for DeepSeek's caching behavior, making things even more inexpensive. I'm retired, but I've been using it for just over two months at about the rate I would use it if I were working half-time, and I've spent $19 total.
replywhat plan are your 'fellow software engineers' using? I have a hard time even using up the Fable part of my allowance in a week of coding.
replyI'm not sure to be fair, but they do have constant "token anxiety", which I simply don't have anymore since using v4 flash.
replywhy do they do if their employers are paying for it?
replybecause once they run out of tokens they can’t do their jobs anymore
replyreally? which employer gives you fixed tokens to do your work?
replyI'm on the Premium business plan and I can easily use up my entire week's allocation in two days of coding. I only use Claude for planning, too, the rest is done by Deepseek and GPT.
replyClaude is very spendy.
Claude is about the least spendy thing a software engineer can use. If you can't afford $200 a month, you're probably not working professionally (which is ok, no value judgement, but then being on the premium business plan is a little strange).
replyThere are two Team plan tiers: Standard and Premium. Not sure what that has to do with working professionally.
replyusually I am - Codex, make pi with deepseek to do something.
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