alt Hacker NewsI'm very curious where we will saturate the curve on "enough" intelligence for coding. At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing. I feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is nearly there. Maybe Flash is too.
Once we hit that point, I am curious how much of Anthropic's current business model falls apart? So far it's always been clear that you just pay for the most intelligent model you can get because it is worth it. It now seems clear to me that there is limited runway on that concept. It is just a question of how long that runway is. I honestly wonder how much of their frantic push to broaden out into enterprise / productivity is because they see this writing on the wall already.
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> I'm very curious where we will saturate the curve on "enough" intelligence for coding. At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing. I feel like DeepSeek V4 Pro is nearly there. Maybe Flash is too.
It's always going to be cost;
developer time vs developer cost vs AI cost vs developer productivity.
With 4.6 it's looking like we are at the upper limit of appetite for cost (for "regular" Business) so the other levers will probably need to change.
Kilo (the open source coding agent) tested Deepseek v4 Pro and Flash vs Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2[1].
It did ok, but scored substantially less than Opus. It also cost nearly as much, even with the current launch promo pricing for Deepseek.
That cost is interesting - I've seen similar things with Sonnet vs Opus, and in my own benchmarking there are some models that benchmark well, seem to have a good price but use so many tokens they cost just as much as "more expensive" models.
[1] https://blog.kilo.ai/p/we-tested-deepseek-v4-pro-and-flash
I imagine we'll get to "good enough" for hobbyist programmers fairly quickly, but businesses will still be willing to pay more for faster and smarter. Why make your programmers wait?
> At some point, you can let a less smart model hammer at a problem for longer and get to the same result, and as long as you are not involved it comes to the same thing.
Is that true? I find the smarter models can just be effective when smaller models can't. It isn't a matter of just waiting longer.