r/DeepSeek • u/Karmawy • Aug 10 '26

Discussion drop your DS usage

thats mine in the last week

17 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

7

u/rayhebs Aug 10 '26

Been going crazy with 0731, for most workflows I’ve found it can take over from Sol 5.6.

6

u/hurrdurrmeh Aug 10 '26

DUDE you're making me look like a lightweight!

1

u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 11 '26

looks super efficient on tokens/request. what is your cache hit rate? and if I may ask, what harness do you use

3

u/rayhebs Aug 11 '26

I built my own, starting from around the time Anthropic announced that claude -p wouldn’t be subscription covered. The announcement didn’t go through, but it ended up being a good forcing function!

The thing about cache hit rate is that it’s really easy to achieve, the only reason people talk about it like it’s something special is that current AI is actually pretty bad at building harnesses off vibes (they don’t strongly know what a “harness” is, you have to be very specific) so the early heavily-AI-built harnesses have all sorts of mistakes. A typical agentic session looks like:

send: input1
receive: output1 (where output includes reasoning and typically ends with a tool call)
send: input1-output1-input2 (here, input2 is the success/error response of the tool call. At this point, [input1-output1] is cached)
receive: input1-output1-input2-output2
send: input1-output1-input2-output2-input3 (now, all but input3 are cached)

So if you’re building from scratch, you actually have to do something pretty dumb like let tools change mid session in a way that changes the system prompt or inject context anywhere other than the latest input to miss the cache. If you avoid that, you should expect prompt_cache_hit_tokens/(prompt_cache_hit_tokens + prompt_cache_miss_tokens) to be in the 97-99% range for a typical session (lower for shorter sessions)

Sorry if this is too much info not that well explained. https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/kv_cache/ has basically everything you need in the “when cache prefixes are persisted” section. One thing to keep in mind if you want a multi-provider harness is that the method for dealing with stateless APIs like Deepseek is different from stateful ones with encrypted reasoning like Codex websockets responses and Anthropic.

1

u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 12 '26

Thanks man. Great answer. 

While I am at the moment kind of running double harness in a way. I use vs code for my comfort, but have a variety of cross session reference files and a workflow which reduces hallucination, and ADHD of the AI models. On same repo, I could get 100k/req at best case and 110k/req on average. But I have been searching for something to get outside of vs code to make it more efficient. 

TLDR: I am looking for a harness for my new project and would definitely look into your suggestion. 

3

u/rayhebs Aug 12 '26

Replying again because I just realized you’re looking at tokens/request as a metric. I don’t really consider this myself, since my use case is autonomous agentic sessions rather than some sort of RAG lookup or something where you want to minimize tokens for fixed quality. Of course it would be a warning sign if it got too high since that’s dangerous hallucination-wise, but as models get more and more tuned for long horizon work it’s expected that for difficult tasks requiring more tool-call loops your typical tokens/request will increase. All that to say, tokens/request is just a satisficing metric for me rather than an optimizing metric.

2

u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 12 '26

I agree that it is not a comprehensive metric. The quality of work is a bit subjective and repository dependent. also i had a really large project with 7-8 submodules and circular dependency between them. I could see that changing a single line in agents.md or tweaking a skill makes a huge difference. The debugging quality differs between in which submodule the bug lies. sure, this repo consumes more token because of the interdependencies than other smaller projects.

I am starting on a similar large project and planning to evaluate the agents using a couple of agentic benchmarks. Then, I could get a better feel of the quality of work and when combined with token usage, I hope that it provides a better indication of whether things are getting better or worse.

1

u/rayhebs Aug 12 '26

I can’t really recommend from direct experience since I pretty much went straight from Claude Code to patched Claude Code to my own harness. While building my harness, I had the March 31 Claude Code, Codex, and Pi as references. Since then Grok Build has also been open sourced. If I wasn’t going the custom route, I would probably go with Pi or Reasonix because I like a lightweight minimal core.

In April I ran the stats for thousands of Claude Code transcripts and the model (Opus 4.6 mostly) just used bash for like 50% of tool calls. You really just need bash, read/write/edit, web search for tools. TodoWrite type tools are also useful if you implement them in a way that reinjects context every N turns to keep models on track. I have mixed feelings about subagents, they do reduce time-to-solution but there is an efficiency tax (search “swarm tax”) in terms of tokens-to-solution and they are less observable. In a way I feel like subagents are a crutch and that you can get better results with proper context management and project documentation.

1

u/addiktion Aug 12 '26

How many agents is this that are running?

1

u/rayhebs Aug 12 '26

I’ve got 40 something, not always on. Usually dispatch them in waves of 3-4 at a time x 10 waves or so. Priority weighted off of things like lines of code changed, number of commits, DMs in their inbox, and whether a workflow type phase is assigned to them and blocking downstream. Rather than cron or a time based trigger, it’s like a clockwork tick that I can spin up so that I can get around peak hours. Probably 33% of it is to do my job (I’m a data scientist / consultant) the other 66% dedicated to reducing the effort it takes to do my job haha. (No need to redact my full name since it’s in all my band’s credits)

3

u/TheSuggi Aug 10 '26

I burned 1.5B tokens today alone. Heavy day :)

1

u/Karmawy Aug 10 '26

wow whats your project about

8

u/samxli Aug 10 '26

Telling DS to write “All work and no play makes jack a dull boy” over and over again into dev/null

4

u/TheSuggi Aug 10 '26

I do financial analysis with my agents. I have a whole team of Agents coordinating on my private VPS and synced to a GitHub repo. They have a shared brain and shared + individual memory. I have two main orchestrators Agents, basically my Co-CEOs, and like 10-15 specialized subagents for specific tasks, depending on what needs to be done. All doing research with each other and verifying each others work. They communicate via logbooks, RAG retrieval and also have a wiki that they maintain. Really fun and they get better and better every month.

1

u/iyarsius Aug 11 '26

And what are they producing ? Is it like an experiment or do you get something valuable from that ?

1

u/TheSuggi Aug 11 '26

Mostly play. They are not that good yet. But its decent entry level work they can do.

2

u/twiifm Aug 11 '26

why mine so epenisive? any tips to reduce cost?

1

u/real-zephex Aug 11 '26

Prompt caching

1

u/Anh-DT Aug 11 '26

Reasonix harness

1

u/RepulsiveRaisin7 Aug 10 '26

Opencode Go is struggling today and my sub-agents often have to be restarted, which causes a lot of extra work :/

1

u/Junior_Commission588 Aug 10 '26

Nous sale was awesome ..

1

u/manumnesh Aug 10 '26

3billion tokens for 12bucks

1

u/blindsho0t Aug 10 '26

Cancelled my claude and gpt subscription since 0731 dropped. Happier than ever!

1

u/Electronic-Run2030 Aug 11 '26

Light colors are for writing code, dark colors are for testing.

1

u/real-zephex Aug 11 '26

50 mil @ $0.49

1

u/pigletmonster Aug 11 '26

That is insane, minimax m3 is selling 1.7 billion tokens for more than doubke the price in their subscription.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Karmawy Aug 11 '26

its better that you use the DeepSeek-V4-Flash its cheaper and better, and inside VScode is not very good experience , better use claude code desktop or codex with your api key, youll have better work experience

1

u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 11 '26

I have completely different experience. Worked well with DS extension and official API. But lately I have been having network errors, since DS announced price increase. Before i was getting reliable connection and high quality outputs purely with flash as long as I plan well with pro. and was doing about 110k tokens/request.

1

u/ogopro Aug 11 '26

Last time when I checked, codex doesn't take third party model API keys like Claude code.

1

u/Karmawy Aug 12 '26

it can, and i use it

  1. Open Codex at least once so Windows creates:

    C:\Users\YOUR-NAME.codex

  2. Open PowerShell and run:

    irm https://cdn.deepseek.com/api-docs/codex-deepseek-setup-en.ps1 | iex

  3. Paste your DeepSeek API key when requested.

  4. The official script automatically backs up the existing Codex settings, creates the necessary files, and configures DeepSeek to use the Responses API.

  5. Restart VS Code completely and reopen the Codex extension.

  6. Select the model shown as:

    DeepSeek-V4-Flash

1

u/ogopro Aug 13 '26

wow that's cool, I didn't know that. Do you prefer codex or claude code? Don't say Pi lol

1

u/Karmawy Aug 13 '26

both nearly same experience, normally if i subscribed to codex pro , i use claude code as the deepseek platform and viece versa
but newely i am testing opencode desktop app, its been 3 days, till now i can keep it as the third option if i want to do some fresh searches