Why not use DeepSeek Flash for everything?

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started using AI heavily when a friend Jonathan Ellis launched his own startup Brokk and I started using his then revolutionary tool Brokk in April of 2025, at that stage basically all models were pretty terrible and things like Cursor or Claude Code were basically useless (I like to call them tooling harnesses because they hook up tools like bash, read, write, internet search to models… and that is most of what they do), so this meant we had to use the latest and greatest to ever get anything done. Brokk despite being basically unusable for a mere mortal (lesson let a designer build the UX), it was light years ahead of Claude Code and Cursor and with the top end model we could get a ton of solid generated code out of things like GPT 4 and Sonnet 3.5. They routinely invented stuff, didn’t know how to look into directories etc, what we knew about prompting then was limited and in general getting good work out of them required a lot of cleverness or at least a willingness to accept really terrible code and a drop in productivity (at least in single threaded modes of work). At least with Brokk with the tools we had built and the efficiencies we engaged in to keep the context small (the total amount of information sent to the models) we could make good use of cheaper less high end models, but generally speaking the lesson was clear, if you could afford it always use the best, or else waste a lot more time and money getting bad results out of the cheaper stuff.

Fable on Random Ramblings

Why not use DeepSeek Flash for everything?