I can't recommend Chinese models enough. My personal favorite is DeepSeek v4.1 Flash but I have tried Qwen 3.8, Kimi 3 and GLM 5.3 which are equally impressive but DeepSeek is the cheapest and fastest regularly hitting 270 token per second.
replyAnd yeah I have worked with Anthropic and OpenAI models, they're good but they cost a fortune while Chinese models are already really good at a fraction of the cost.
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash is fascinating and uneven. It's way too chatty in OpenCode to be a collaboration partner. I tried dsh-tui which feels comparable to the codex/claude tui's and it's usable. but it seems to be "brilliant and yet stupid" in a way I can't quite put my finger on. I've got too much real work to get done to dig into it so until the big boys price me out of the market I'm back to my $100/month deal.
replyI was working exclusively with DS 4.1 Flash until Opus 5.5 got me back to a sub. I was disillusioned with what was available.
replyI keep hearing about these Chinese models, but what exactly are you doing with the models and coding? I have a need to fully write code with full tool calling capabilities. Not just methods or functions. I want to be able to prompt a feature and it makes the JIRA ticket, and fully implements it and makes a PR. I don't want to babysit it or even read the code. Once it creates the PR, I want it to monitor it for any comments fro Copilot/security review and then fix it as necessary.
replyIs that what the Chinese models are capable of? If so, how are you using them? API? Or is there an inference provider that is as fast as the big 2? What about the coding harness?