Why hackers moved from Claude Opus to DeepSeek
1 hacker described this switch in public comments. Their words, with links to the originals.
What hackers said about the move
“previously I would switch to Opus for some heavier work but I stopped recently”piterrro, 2026-10-28original comment ↗
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Claude Opus vs DeepSeek
| Claude Opus | DeepSeek | |
|---|---|---|
| Hackers who recommend | 5 | 8 |
| Hackers who criticize | 2 | 0 |
| Moved away from it | 6 | 0 |
| Moved to it | 1 | 2 |
Counts are distinct hackers in the sampled comments, not market share.
Criticism of Claude Opus
“My personal experience has been Opus is unusable on design work it's so terrible.”nijave, 2026-09-26original comment ↗
“This seems a worsening that seems to have started at Opus 4.8.”ghoul2, 2026-09-02original comment ↗
Praise for DeepSeek
“I am using DeepSeek directly via the API. The speed is insane.”wg0, 2026-09-22original comment ↗
“spent time looking at billions of tokens from DeepSeek (and other open models) in our coding agent.”ahmadawais, 2026-07-07original comment ↗
“Deepseek V4 Flash is suprisingly capable and insanely cheap.”simjnd, 2026-06-09original comment ↗
“A handful of honest participants like DeepSeek are pay as you go instead of trying to sneakily bill you for usage.”trollbridge, 2026-06-02original comment ↗
“And deepseek v4 flash (the sonnet comparable) costs 3% of what sonnet does.”calpaterson, 2026-05-29original comment ↗