Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Kuyawa 51 days ago
I am using DeepSeek extensively to develop apps, three in the last month, with my own CLI coding agent [1] developed by DeepSeek itself line by line. I haven't spent $1 yet in well over 10 million tokens.

If I considered myself a 10X programmer, now I am 100X. Love DeepSeek.

[1] https://github.com/kuyawa/mecha-ai
1 comments
edg5000 50 days ago
Have you compared it against other coding agents? What is your general workflow with DeepSeek; do you write a spec and then have it implement and test? Very interesting to hear. Becuase your harness is adapted to DeepSeek, you probably prompt and it very differently; since its adapted to the model this may explain why it works well for you. Wiring up an existing harness that is not tested on DeepSeek may not yield optimal results.
link
Kuyawa 49 days ago
No, I have not tested other coding agents. DeepSeek works well enough for what I need. From what I've seen I can guess that Claude, now with the new Design feature, is ten times more effective as it also creates images, styles and media, thing that DeepSeek doesn't, yet, but for now I try to keep my designs simple and find a free hero pic somewhere to keep the costs low and the mental friction lower.

So yes, there might be better coding agents but for the price and the results I am pretty satisfied.

My workflow is simple as a solo developer, for simple tasks I write a single message in the terminal and watch it do its magic, for complex tasks or the starting of a project, I write a start.txt prompt with detailed info about the app, the tech stack, the auth protocol, database design, rules and conditions, business intelligence, styles dark/ligh and responsive, and then watch it run for over five to ten minutes developing a whole fully functional app from zero. It doesn't hit 100% of the requirements most of the time (close to 95%) so I do some final tweaks where needed, like short names for tables and fields (weird mania, I know) and color/fonts tweaks, but I've never complained about missing functionality.

Now about the wiring, I believe, from the docs [1] (The DeepSeek API uses an API format compatible with OpenAI/Anthropic), they all use the same standard for communicating with the LLM, so they're all pluggable.

[1] https://api-docs.deepseek.com

link