It's not just you. I tried an Opencode Go subscription, and experimented with most of their models (GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Deepseek), and none of them got anywhere close to Opus - the difference in quality was very noticeable, especially with Deepseek V4 Pro and Flash.
The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus.
But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.
> But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.
The argument was never that DeepSeek is on a level with Opus - the argument is that DeepSeek is good enough for the majority of day-to-day engineering tasks (where Opus is decidedly overkill).
Absolutely. The cost comparison is roughly between DeepSeek and Haiku (assuming a reputable Western provider, not DeepSeek's own API) whereas the average capabilities sit comfortably above Sonnet.
The only caveats: I didn't play around with Qwen 3.7 Max very much, and of course these models are far cheaper than Opus.
But any suggestion that Deepseek approaches Opus in terms of quality/intelligence immediately makes me suspect propaganda - it's that noticeable of a difference.