You can do real world development with weaker models than Deepseek Flash.
I still use SOTA for the main model though, but also I'm perfectly aware it's mostly out of FOMO.
Deepseek is more than enough for default subagents though. Any well defined and verifiable task and there's absolutely zero difference between SOTA and good-enough models. Used to be just speed, but Deepseek is fast.
I have same the same FOMO to use SOTA model for all planning and brainstorming session. However, I’m unsure how do you bring deepseek for subagent task. Could you describe your workflow?
For myself, using Codex, I always have to explicitly tell codex to use Luna with high reasoning for smaller, bit size tasks.