I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus.
Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, and I add just two extra tools: pi-sandbox and a paid for search service tool. This setup works great with the latest deepseek v4 flash, switching to more powerful open models occasionally.
I wrote my own coding harness in Common Lisp that is almost free or 3rd party libraries and I basically copied pi + the 6 tools I use for pi (except I have two search tools using different vendors in my Common Lisp code).
Everyone (and every company?) should run their own tests and experiments. I find it sad when I talk with people who default to the most complex and the most expensive tools without even trying to evaluate alternatives.
Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, and I add just two extra tools: pi-sandbox and a paid for search service tool. This setup works great with the latest deepseek v4 flash, switching to more powerful open models occasionally.
I wrote my own coding harness in Common Lisp that is almost free or 3rd party libraries and I basically copied pi + the 6 tools I use for pi (except I have two search tools using different vendors in my Common Lisp code).
Everyone (and every company?) should run their own tests and experiments. I find it sad when I talk with people who default to the most complex and the most expensive tools without even trying to evaluate alternatives.