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points by AlotOfReading 12 hours ago | 0 comments

Don't know what you're doing, but it's good enough for the reasonably sized tasks I give LLMs. It's also a much better price. My browser stopped rendering the UI frame recently because I messed up permissions on /usr/share/icons. Took DS 4.1 flash about 3 minutes and a few cents to diagnose it. Same harness with opus 5 took twice as long and several dollars.

Moreover, the months I've used anthropic/OAI exclusively my API token costs are in the hundreds (or sometimes thousands). With DS flash as the first agent I reach for, I rarely exceed $40/mo.

[–] jeffbee 12 hours ago

I meant for generative coding. I'm sure it can do a few things here and there.

[–] AlotOfReading 12 hours ago

I figured it was assumed I was including that? It's been fine as long as I break tasks up into reasonably sized chunks, which is fine because I think you should only be generating as much as you can comfortably review at a time.

[–] jameson 8 hours ago

I'm a heavy DS v4.1 user and been satisfied with its performance. I use it just like you described -- "... break tasks up into reasonably sized chunks...".

Every once in a while I come across comments that just hates DS. I wonder if it's a matter of how people use it or the prompt. I admit pre-v4.1 was pretty bad, hallucinating too much and not getting the abstractions right so I had to correct it often.

I also have $200 Claude subscription (now called "Ultra"). Fable gets abstractions right on highly complex problems (e.g. defining protocol that spans multiple services) that DS simply cannot do. However, DS is comparable to Opus 5.5, although less "intelligent", but DS excels at speed which is what I prefer than waiting minutes on Opus 5.5.

[–] andreypopp 12 hours ago

How did you use it? I was using it as "implementor" subagents orchestrated by opus 5.5 and it was pretty good and fast.