While Im still personally skeptical on the ability of these tools to produce a GOOD software engineer, it’s something I should probably consider testing in a limited capacity.

I’ve noticed Deepseek has a few integrations, both official and hobbyist, with text editors like Claude Code. Plus, I’d rather not pay £20/mo for any of this stuff, let alone to any AI company NOT linked to the CPC.

I might consider a locally hosted model but the upfront cost for anything that can run it decently fast/high params are quite prohibitive. My home server isn’t really set up for good cooling!

  • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    15 days ago

    I’ve never heard anything specific about DeepSeek tho, I assume it’s strong on value and a great way to save on cost until you hit a problem that requires bigger thinkier models. Can it use MCP? I know SWE is very spotty on using MCP, even when you explicitly beg it to.

    • gay_king_prince_charles [she/her, he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      15 days ago

      Deepseek can use MCP over the API if you have an MCP client. Although the use case for MCP isn’t as big as advertised. Deepseek-reasoner does a great job with those “thinkier” problems, especially if you chain the outputs and provide the right context. I don’t think it’s as good as Claude Sonnet-4.5, but it’s around 30 times cheaper.