I'd be curious to know the background around this. At work, I've used @anthropic/Opus 5.5 through Portkey with Pi, and ended up with $10 within less than 10 message exchanges, on a fairly trivial topic. OTOH, when using Claude Code directly with Opus 5.5, I basically spent $30 for a good back-and-forth across a full chat, reaching the point where CC kicked off compaction.
I cannot get behind CC is the best harness. Once u switched to pi I knew I was never going back and occasionally I need to use CC for my subscription and find it unpleasant. CC is just this incoherent hodge podge of functionality that seems to have no vision. Subjective, of course.
I feel like the max CC plans are incredible value.
I personally don't use Pi but Zed, but Claude is plugged using ACP on my Pro plan. I would never pay the API prices that's way too expensive.
Anything extra you can add yourself. You just ask whatever model you’re using to query the documentation included in the pi application and then its away.
Works.
When I was using anthropic subs, my "equivalent usage" was $6k/month.
On the open models, it's < $100/month.
Same work (actually, more.)
If you see no difference at all in between Opus and Deepseek Flash for your work, that is great! Personally, I found the latter to be unusable for the projects I was working on.
For what it's worth, I use DS flash for statistical analysis, design, scripting, server maintenance. The same I used for Opus.
I can include any custom programs I need in a skill, and the SKILL.md file is just a doc of how to use those. It helps me save tokens and ensures determinism with repeated workflows since redoing a task is just calling a skill's program.
I also load only skills that are necessary for a project. I don't want to pollute the context window with unneeded skills.
According to the article you can ask Pi to write ssuch extensions, so you don't have to, right?
[0]: https://pi.dev/packages/pi-claude-bridge?name=claude-bridge [1]: https://pi.dev/packages/@sting8k/pi-vcc?name=pi-vcc
When making a harness, it is so, so easy to do the "web thing" and have your system prompt be a template where you dynamically inject variables like the current date or the contents of the current working directory, and then just re-render that template on every request. THis is a bad, doubleplusungood, terrible, awful idea, and you should never do this under any circumstances. Anthropic will soon force you not to by literally refusing conversations that "break continuity" in this way and do anything but append new user messages at the end, but other providers at least appear to work.
I use a cheap deepseek model for compaction on purpose since it costs a penny or two and does not use any of my Anthropic quota.
1. Potential ban due to ToS violation;
2. It doesn't follow all Anthropic's communication mechanisms out-of-the-box, they heavily use custom headers, hidden flags, and undocumented API features that affect models' behavior;
3. Compact is better in CC (significantly);
4. Cache related nuances (I mean, A\ regularly messes up with cache even in CC, their caching is non-trivial);
5. It's almost unavoidable to use Pi's extensions, and I wouldn't trust my oauth token to anything third-party (take a look at regular reddit/X posts where people getting banned due to such leaks and abuse) -> it takes enormous amount of hacking on top of Pi to get closer to CC abilities.
CC has hooks and mods, even ui_* (undocumented) protocol if you need some big customization, those are enough to implement whatever you want on top of CC.
Also, I'm working with CC from the very first versions, as for me - it's the best harness (as-is) on the market. I have zero clue what problems people are talking about (except known big issues, 3-4 over the years, I've never had serious problems, at all). Seamless and smooth experience, optimized for Anthropic models.
P.S. You can consider this as Stockholm syndrome effect, but... you have close to zero chances to get unbanned with Anthropic, and it's the best coding model(s) available today.