DeepClaude – Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 Pro

    #!/bin/sh
    export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic
    export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=sk-secret
    export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=deepseek-v4-flash
    export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1
    exec claude $@

https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations...

From what I see while building my own agentic system in Elixir, the problem is in training for your specific harness/contracts. Claude/GPT-style models seem to be trained around very specific contracts used by the harness like tool call formats, planning structure, patching, reading files, recovering from errors, and knowing when to stop.

In practice, you either need a very strong general model that can infer and follow those contracts (expensive), or a weaker model that has been fine-tuned / trained specifically on your own agent contracts. Otherwise, the whole thing becomes flaky very quickly. And I suspect with Deepseek V4 you may get last options.

This is a heavily subsidized price and will only last until the end of the month: "The deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount, extended until 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC." [0]

The "supported backends" table is also deceiving -- while OpenRouter's server's may be in the US, the only way to get the $0.44/$0.87 pricing is to pass through to the DeepSeek API, which of course is China-based. [1]

I do think the model is quite good, I myself use it through Ollama Cloud for simple tasks. But I think some folks have bought in a little too much to the marketing hype around it.

[0] https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing [1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro/providers

If you look at the terminal-bench@2.0 leaderboard, you'll quickly see it's actually one of the weakest agentic harnesses. Anthropic's own models score lower with Claude Code than with virtually any other harness.

So it's quite the opposite. Claude Code is arguably the worst harness to run models with.

Yes and this is a temporary discount which increases to 3.48 USD on 2026/05/31 15:59 UTC.

Source: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing

do you have any benchmarks on: - token usage over time - failures/retry rates

would be great to see how it behaves in production

Not only can it seamlessly and dynamically switch between DeepSeek V4 Flash, V4 Pro, and other mainstream models within the same context, but it is also 100% compatible with Claude Code.

I was able to use it in agent mode with Roo, I stopped after having it write out a plan, but I'll continue when I have more time.

Deepseek feels less likely to do a straight up rug pull since you can self host with enough money, but I'm still more excited about local solutions.

Usually I just need grunt work done. I'm not solving difficult problems.

So I think I'll stay with CC for now.

I am using Claude Code with GLM 5.1, MiniMax M2.7, Kimi K2.6 and Xiaomi MiMo V2.5 Pro.

The edge Anthropic has on others lies on its models performance. CLI tooling (and obviously pricing) is definitely not better than others.

(I have no experience with running anything locally, maybe it's a stupid question)

[1] A fancier way of saying "reducing cost."