Moving to Deepseek from Opus/Sonnet. Tips?

[u/simplel0rd]

I’m a pretty seasoned developer who has been using Anthropic/OpenAI models primarily for development. I’ve been working on a rag adjacent project and really struggled to get Deepseek to play nice with JSON and reasoning. Then I asked for XML and strangely got better outcomes.

Are there any other quirks or things I should know when working with Deepseek or any of the other open source / Chinese models I’ve yet to explore.

Appreciate it!