Now my provider serves DeepSeek around 300 tokens a second. The code is shit but I can have a few more rounds of corrections.
DeepSeek was maybe a dollar for the full PR. Opus/Astra over 50 dollars. And double that if you use their fast variants which matches the DeepSeek speeds on certain providers.
Yes, it is so good I rarely test new models anymore. Or think about cost.
Actually I felt since 4.5, it was “good enough” for basic coding (and competing models have reached that level as well). The big improvements since then have been longer-horizon tasks. Giving it a vague description of a problem, then come back hours later and find it did a better job than I would have. And since 5.5 I haven’t encountered any more load bearing seams.
Maybe it’s slow, but I’m not interacting with the models in a live chat anymore for most work. I’m giving them tasks to do async. The limiting factor is actually my bandwidth reviewing their output.
I am eyeing a huge codebase built with Opus. Did multiple passes of refactoring for things like using traits not just free functions. And using the Rust types like PathBuf from the damn standard library not just strings everywhere.
Oh and it is so hard to use a crate. Let's just vibe an inferior version and push another 5k line PR. Nobody reads them anyway right? Logos schlogos, a lexer is easy to write, right?
Maybe I am just getting old, but I remember a time when we were proud on the code we wrote. Now I read some of the old stuff and get a bit sad for what we lost.
Don't get me wrong DeepSeek also does this. But if the model is 100x more expensive I expect better. Of course if you never read the code it's ok. But it does the same mistakes and cannot design great architecture...