I use DeepSeek every day (via VSCode Insiders and Zed Editor). It's very affordable and, while it's slightly behind Claude (not sure how far behind Fable), it suits my working style well. I'm not using unsupervised multi-agent workflows and don't need a library of skills files - I'm writing most of the code and leaning on AI to help with mundane tasks - like;
- generating types for APIs
- generating boilerplate based on existing code
- improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that)
- Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries
- Creating implementations against hand written tests
- Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries
- Writing documentation
I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens.
It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before.
As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available.
- generating types for APIs
- generating boilerplate based on existing code
- improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that)
- Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries
- Creating implementations against hand written tests
- Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries
- Writing documentation
I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens.
It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before.
As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available.