alt Hacker NewsI'm still using DS-flash - it beats frontier model on speed and cost keeping good enough code quality. It depends on the harness and constraints you give to the model but for most of the tasks its a great fit, I have not switched from DS since couple of weeks already (previously I would switch to Opus for some heavier work but I stopped recently).
My harness consists of multi-level AGENTS.md and SOUL.md containing "grug brain developer" and "asd-ste100" type of speech for clearer communication.
For me, DS Flash quality is still insufficient for bigger / more complex tasks. DS has gotten better by a lot, but I prefer Opus 5.5 because it gets things right with much fewer tokens. DS also sometimes gets stuck in a thinking loop "hmm... hmmm... hmmmm hmm hmmmm..." which is hilarious when you check on it after 30 minutes