Your experience with DeepSeek v4 Flash differs from mine: while I usually use DeepSeek v4 Pro (that is also inexpensive), I find using DeepSeek v4 Flash with the Fireworks.ai API and properly configured OpenCode to be very good for routine work, and it is pleasantly very fast. Admittedly I use DeepSeek v4 Pro for difficult problems.
I encourage people to at least once a month to do a quick evaluation with their own problems and workflows. Estimate cost as both what inference tokens cost for a task and also how much human effort it takes to get required results.
We are also using fireworks as our model provider. Our harness is openClaw, so tasks are not only coding but all kinds of tasks.
For instance, I asked to fetch some info from the web via Chrome browser and to collect the info in an MD.
The MD never appeared, even though it claimed to. I asked it three times to write the MD and it was always: “oh yes, I do it now..” then nothing. The search itself also was very bad because it just gave up after one page and hallucinated an answer and - even worse :-) - told me it was very thorough…
Have to ask: did you try 'xhigh' thinking effort with Flash? I also found it nearly unusable on just 'high', but on 'xhigh' it's nearly equivalent to Pro's 'high'.
I encourage people to at least once a month to do a quick evaluation with their own problems and workflows. Estimate cost as both what inference tokens cost for a task and also how much human effort it takes to get required results.
I disregard benchmarks.