Maybe I just haven't been trying the right models?
The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus.
But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.
The argument was never that DeepSeek is on a level with Opus - the argument is that DeepSeek is good enough for the majority of day-to-day engineering tasks (where Opus is decidedly overkill).
Because even the latest opus on High don't really get what is needed, and need careful steering and a rewriting in most cases, and the code is often hard to review.
I'd rather just launch a smaller model in plan mode, argue with it and make it implement the bases I will write the code into. writing code is often faster once you know what you want, and AI most useful ability is to be a canary that also propose stuff. And I find my method faster than generating everything then reading the code to find mistakes or understand why it used X instead of Y.
I don't really read generated frontend code anyway (nor do anybody in my team care) , so I generate it and push it if it does the stuff I want it to do. For IAC it's mostly boilerplate except for 1-2 lines most of the time, and at worst a dozen, if you know where to look (and check the AI doesn't suffer from NIH), it's really easy to review generated code.