the more i use deepseek v4.1 flash, the harder it is to justify using a frontier model for everything. a few more things i’ve noticed: 1. it’s insanely good as an orchestrator. i can let it coordinate coding tasks, testing, research, and subagents without burning frontier-model money. 2. once the plan is clear, it handles repetitive implementation work extremely well. 3. i’ve started using it for verification too: reviewing code changes, running checks, and catching obvious mistakes is cheap enough to do constantly. i still bring in opus or sol for harder edge cases... but deepseek is doing more and more of the actual work.