It seems like any project that makes fun of Claude is bound to reach the top spot on Hacker News. Even if it’s just a project consisting of four lines of code.
There probably isn't a point. Someone didn't understand something, didn't research it, so they 1 shotted their first thought and sent it to the front page of HN and all of their socials. It's the future bruh
I'm curious how well it actually works. I tried Deepseek with Hermes and Opencode and it seemed extremely bad about using some of the basic tools given, like the Hermes holographic memory tools, even with system prompt instructions strongly pointing them out.
I don't always copy paste vibe coded project readme mds into Claude code and ask them to rewrite it but when I do, actually that's all I do now because my goal in life is to make wealthy overvalued companies wealthier.
If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
agreed. OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness. my sideproject mouse.dev I’ve been combining parts from OpenCode, Claude Code, and Hermes to build a cloud agent architecture that works well from mobile.
I haven’t run formal evals but i improved the experience for my own needs and it feels noticeably better with these modifications.
-Claude-style subagents
-an MCP layer for higher-level tools
-Cursor-style control plane modes like Ask, Plan, Debug, and Build.
The MCP layer lets the harness use things like GitHub file/code read, PR creation, web search/fetch, structured user questions, plan-mode switching, user skills, and subagents.
So the improvement is mostly from better ui/ux orchestration and tool access. There's some things from hermes that are interesting as well.
Most of my focus has been on applying this stack to sandboxed cloud agents so you can properly code and work from mobile devices.
I can't definitively say that the stack is better or worse than Claude code, more just tuned for my use case I guess.
Looked into this one. Thought it was suspicious that it only had 7 open issues on github. Turns out they have a bot that auto-closes every single issue just because.
If you're okay with sonnet level performance, this sounds like a straight upgrade. But I find that sonnet messes up too much, that it ends up not being worth cost optimizing down to using it or another sonnet-level model. Glad to have this as an option though
Like me: that’s what I do. Either Opus 4.7 or GLM 5.1 for planning, write it out to a markdown file, then farm it out to Qwen 3.6 27B on my DGX Spark-alike using Pi. Works amusingly well all things considered.
It's surprisingly good. Beats MiniMax 2.7 and Qwen 3.5 Plus in my testing (I haven't tested 3.6 plus though), quite handily. It's far better than Sonnet, and often equivalent to Opus for the web development and OCaml tasks I'm using it for. It definitely isn't Opus 4.7, but its far good enough to earn it's keep and is substantially cheaper.
Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies
It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU
Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!
I keep re-learning this lesson: I chug along with a lesser model then throw a problem at it that's too complex. Then I try different models until I give up and bring in Opus 4.6 to clean up.
I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
This has become a problem for me. I like trying new things. But I also know that in about a week, there's going to be a better/cheaper setup. And a week after that. And ideally I'd like to get some coding done when I'm not tinkering with the tools.
welp, pack it it in boys, it was nice conceptualizing all you as real humans on the internet. I guess I'll just have to go touch grass if I want to feel parasocial.
I mean, we have the tech and community to actually build in person meetups and sign CRT certificates, right?
If we touch grass in person and swap certificate requests, we can actually rebuild a trust network.
This is a pretty old problem with regards to clubs / secret societies and whatnot. And with certificates / PKI, our modern security tools have solved all the technical problems.
Unfortunately, a lot of whats happening in the tech world seems to be from some super serious AI cults, so not sure goin offline like this is any better.
Yea but we could have fun. Play some dnd. Drink tea or whiskey. Eat pizza pie. Light saber battle. Buy a megaphone and hang out at a street corner telling passerbys they are perfectly acceptable and worthy of kindness and love
Unless I actually know the author I assume everything here is vibeslop and full of mistakes.
Maybe I need to switch to some news publication that actually does real research and writing still. Because public forums like this have been completely destroyed by LLMs.
This repo's README explains how it works and you can do it yourself. claude looks for environment variables that say which API endpoint to talk to, which key to pass, which model name to use for haiku/sonnet/opus-level workloads, etc.
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://openrouter.ai/api" ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="$OPENROUTER_API_KEY" ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash" CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1 claude
Also opencode tracks you by default. Its not safe. Every first prompt you send is routed through their servers, logged and they can use your data however they want
I like being able to add a wide array of models, define perms for agents and subagents, turn MCPs on and off at will, and be able to fix bugs I find in it.
Coding harnesses make a big difference, and OpenCode is notably less effective than Claude Code (1) in my experience, (2) with the models I've tried it on. (I've not yet tried it with DSv4.)
anthropic messed up big time harness works with any muh commodity LLM, meanwhile VCs were duped on the myth of FOOM AGI, probably not a cooincidence Anthropic is enmeshed with the scifi fan fic forum known as lesswrong. The world wants useful tools. The bay area bubble in contrast thrives on Mythos.
I think OAI and Anthropic will be ok for a year or two. But after that If they still continue to earn revenues from selling tokens to firms/software engineers they will be in serious trouble.
The American firms are not demonstrating escape velocity and as long as china offers something somewhat comparable and offers it at a very low price to compensate for any difference in quality, they will not be generating enough in cash flows to finance reinvestment. I highly doubt they’ll be able to continue raising external financing for numerous periods from here on out - they gotta start showing strong financials and that they are running away from the open source models.
The AI wars have begun
It seems like any project that makes fun of Claude is bound to reach the top spot on Hacker News. Even if it’s just a project consisting of four lines of code.
I'm not exactly sure what the point of this is. Deepseek already has instructions to use its API with many CLI's including Claude Code directly:
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
There probably isn't a point. Someone didn't understand something, didn't research it, so they 1 shotted their first thought and sent it to the front page of HN and all of their socials. It's the future bruh
I thought the tool format wasnt exactly the same ? So plugging any IA into claude code requires a conversion of format
Many of them expose “anthropic-compatible” APIs for this very purpose.
DeepSeek has a dedicated Anthropic-compatible endpoint [1].
[1] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/guides/anthropic_api
I'm curious how well it actually works. I tried Deepseek with Hermes and Opencode and it seemed extremely bad about using some of the basic tools given, like the Hermes holographic memory tools, even with system prompt instructions strongly pointing them out.
From vibe coders for vibe coders
I don't always copy paste vibe coded project readme mds into Claude code and ask them to rewrite it but when I do, actually that's all I do now because my goal in life is to make wealthy overvalued companies wealthier.
If you're looking for Claude Code alternatives, I would first suggest looking into pi.dev or opencode for your harness. And then for models, you can choose from OpenCode Go (IMO most cost effect at this moment), OpenRouter, or direct from DeepSeek. Better if you go the Kimi route IMO and just buy a subscription from kimi.com
Another very cost-effective option is Ollama Cloud. In a month of use, I only hit the 5-hour limit once, when I ran 8 agents simultaneously for 2 hours.
definitely worth it - have both ollama cloud, opencode and hermes running to test them all out, working great so far.
agreed. OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness. my sideproject mouse.dev I’ve been combining parts from OpenCode, Claude Code, and Hermes to build a cloud agent architecture that works well from mobile.
> OpenCode is a strong base, and with a couple modifications it can become a very effective harness.
I personally didn't find it to be competitve with Claude Code as a harness. Can I ask how you modified it to perform better?
I haven’t run formal evals but i improved the experience for my own needs and it feels noticeably better with these modifications.
-Claude-style subagents -an MCP layer for higher-level tools -Cursor-style control plane modes like Ask, Plan, Debug, and Build.
The MCP layer lets the harness use things like GitHub file/code read, PR creation, web search/fetch, structured user questions, plan-mode switching, user skills, and subagents.
So the improvement is mostly from better ui/ux orchestration and tool access. There's some things from hermes that are interesting as well.
Most of my focus has been on applying this stack to sandboxed cloud agents so you can properly code and work from mobile devices.
I can't definitively say that the stack is better or worse than Claude code, more just tuned for my use case I guess.
I’m going to throw my harness in the ring: https://codeberg.org/mlow/lmcli
> I would first suggest looking into pi.dev
Looked into this one. Thought it was suspicious that it only had 7 open issues on github. Turns out they have a bot that auto-closes every single issue just because.
I honestly have no words.
If you're okay with sonnet level performance, this sounds like a straight upgrade. But I find that sonnet messes up too much, that it ends up not being worth cost optimizing down to using it or another sonnet-level model. Glad to have this as an option though
A lot of people are having good experiences doing things like using opus for designing and using locally hosted qwen3.6 for implementation.
I could see a serious cost reduction story by using opus for design and deepseek for implementation.
Personally I would avoid anthropic entirely. But I get why people don't.
Like me: that’s what I do. Either Opus 4.7 or GLM 5.1 for planning, write it out to a markdown file, then farm it out to Qwen 3.6 27B on my DGX Spark-alike using Pi. Works amusingly well all things considered.
How is glm 5.1? I have t tried it yet but have been meaning too
It's surprisingly good. Beats MiniMax 2.7 and Qwen 3.5 Plus in my testing (I haven't tested 3.6 plus though), quite handily. It's far better than Sonnet, and often equivalent to Opus for the web development and OCaml tasks I'm using it for. It definitely isn't Opus 4.7, but its far good enough to earn it's keep and is substantially cheaper.
What hardware are you using to power this?
> DGX Spark-alike
Probably wasn't clear enough if you don't know what that is already, apologies
It's an Asus Ascent GX10, which is a little mini PC with 128GB of LPDDR5X as shared memory for an Nvidia GB10 "Blackwell" (kind of, it's a long story) GPU and a MediaTek ARM CPU
Ah yeah I saw that, I was just curious which particular mini-PC you were using. I was considering picking up one of the various AI Max 395 boxes before the RAMpocalypse but didn't take the plunge. Thanks for the response!
I keep re-learning this lesson: I chug along with a lesser model then throw a problem at it that's too complex. Then I try different models until I give up and bring in Opus 4.6 to clean up.
And I keep using Opus to like, make git commits. Really just need a smart router that is actually smart, vs having to micromanage model
I don’t find this with sonnet at all. As long as I have a solid Claude.md and periodically review the output and enforce good code practices via basic CI gates I’ve rarely ever found myself having to switch to opus
This has become a problem for me. I like trying new things. But I also know that in about a week, there's going to be a better/cheaper setup. And a week after that. And ideally I'd like to get some coding done when I'm not tinkering with the tools.
So I think I'll stay with CC for now.
obviously vibe coded ( co authored ) + the prices dont even match
It's going to be real hard to find headlines that weren't vibe coded from here on out unfortunately.
welp, pack it it in boys, it was nice conceptualizing all you as real humans on the internet. I guess I'll just have to go touch grass if I want to feel parasocial.
I mean, we have the tech and community to actually build in person meetups and sign CRT certificates, right?
If we touch grass in person and swap certificate requests, we can actually rebuild a trust network.
This is a pretty old problem with regards to clubs / secret societies and whatnot. And with certificates / PKI, our modern security tools have solved all the technical problems.
I wish I could be invited to a secret club of guaranteed humans. Someone hand me a certificate next time you see me! Also don't stab me kthxbye
Unfortunately, a lot of whats happening in the tech world seems to be from some super serious AI cults, so not sure goin offline like this is any better.
Yea but we could have fun. Play some dnd. Drink tea or whiskey. Eat pizza pie. Light saber battle. Buy a megaphone and hang out at a street corner telling passerbys they are perfectly acceptable and worthy of kindness and love
Unless I actually know the author I assume everything here is vibeslop and full of mistakes.
Maybe I need to switch to some news publication that actually does real research and writing still. Because public forums like this have been completely destroyed by LLMs.
poorly vibe coded. machines can check details easily, use them.
Is there a way to do this directly by using claudecode CLI (which I already have installed) and openrouter??
Yes, from Claude Code themselves: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway
This repo's README explains how it works and you can do it yourself. claude looks for environment variables that say which API endpoint to talk to, which key to pass, which model name to use for haiku/sonnet/opus-level workloads, etc.
Yes, Deepseek even documents how:
https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...
Here's a oneliner:
the wrapper is basically env var glue. You’re still betting the whole loop on Anthropic's closed client.
Cost engineering [1] will be the next hot topic for AI.
[1] A fancier way of saying "reducing cost."
I had a call with our CTO and we are pivoting away from Claude Code to DeepClaude because the cost savings are too substantial to ignore.
Oh shoot now the next CC upgrade will blow your subscription for doing this
Why wouldn't you use something open source like OpenCode, which already support DSv4 and has more features than CC?
More features than CC ?
Also opencode tracks you by default. Its not safe. Every first prompt you send is routed through their servers, logged and they can use your data however they want
I could not find any evidence of prompt logging. The code is open; can you point me to it?
I thought this was debunked awhile ago. ?
As someone who does use other models with CC, I am curious about opencode, what extra features does it have that you find essential?
I like being able to add a wide array of models, define perms for agents and subagents, turn MCPs on and off at will, and be able to fix bugs I find in it.
fair enough...any drawbacks that you've found?
Its UI isn't as slick, and it has bugs, but so does CC and you can submit a PR to have them fixed in OC.
Coding harnesses make a big difference, and OpenCode is notably less effective than Claude Code (1) in my experience, (2) with the models I've tried it on. (I've not yet tried it with DSv4.)
anthropic messed up big time harness works with any muh commodity LLM, meanwhile VCs were duped on the myth of FOOM AGI, probably not a cooincidence Anthropic is enmeshed with the scifi fan fic forum known as lesswrong. The world wants useful tools. The bay area bubble in contrast thrives on Mythos.
I think OAI and Anthropic will be ok for a year or two. But after that If they still continue to earn revenues from selling tokens to firms/software engineers they will be in serious trouble.
The American firms are not demonstrating escape velocity and as long as china offers something somewhat comparable and offers it at a very low price to compensate for any difference in quality, they will not be generating enough in cash flows to finance reinvestment. I highly doubt they’ll be able to continue raising external financing for numerous periods from here on out - they gotta start showing strong financials and that they are running away from the open source models.