I retired a few years ago, but I still write a fair bit of code. I was using Copilot's code completion before I retired, but coding agents hadn't come around yet. I've been wanting to try them, but I kept putting it off, and now the price increases make it hard to justify.
So I just started trying CodeWhale (https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale) with DeepSeek V4. I expected to be impressed by the abilities (which still require plenty of oversight). I didn't expect to be completely shocked by how cheep it is. After most of a week of using it 4-8 hours a day, which would amount to a full week of coding in many jobs after you account for non-coding activities, I'm about to hit $3 in total usage. So we're talking $10-20 per month for single-agent use by a full time software developer? And I'm sure some of my usage is waste as I'm still getting my head around things like compaction. If I take a break for a few weeks, I pay nothing because there is no subscription.
If DeepSeek and Xiaomi MiMo stay within a few months of the US-based models in terms of capabilities and US companies don't figure out how to drastically cut prices, I can't see how China hasn't already won. Protectionism would be one reason, but that might be ceding 50-90% of the total addressable market, and bring us closer to moving knowledge work out of the US the same way we did with manufacturing because it's too expensive in the US.
alt Hacker News
I retired a few years ago, but I still write a fair bit of code. I was using Copilot's code completion before I retired, but coding agents hadn't come around yet. I've been wanting to try them, but I kept putting it off, and now the price increases make it hard to justify.
So I just started trying CodeWhale (https://github.com/Hmbown/CodeWhale) with DeepSeek V4. I expected to be impressed by the abilities (which still require plenty of oversight). I didn't expect to be completely shocked by how cheep it is. After most of a week of using it 4-8 hours a day, which would amount to a full week of coding in many jobs after you account for non-coding activities, I'm about to hit $3 in total usage. So we're talking $10-20 per month for single-agent use by a full time software developer? And I'm sure some of my usage is waste as I'm still getting my head around things like compaction. If I take a break for a few weeks, I pay nothing because there is no subscription.
If DeepSeek and Xiaomi MiMo stay within a few months of the US-based models in terms of capabilities and US companies don't figure out how to drastically cut prices, I can't see how China hasn't already won. Protectionism would be one reason, but that might be ceding 50-90% of the total addressable market, and bring us closer to moving knowledge work out of the US the same way we did with manufacturing because it's too expensive in the US.