DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

A user found V4.1 Flash-1017 smart enough for small projects, but says DeepSeek Harness lacks features versus Claude Code and Codex, and a timing-out tool script can hang the whole session.

Output looked good with fine detail, and the model rendered its SVG to PNG and checked it in headless Chrome — something the tester says no other model has done.

A short take arguing there is little reason to keep using gpt-6.1-sol when deepseek-v4.1-1017 costs a tenth as much.

A user shares a video claiming DeepSeek V4.1-1017 outperformed Gemini 4 Argon on a task in one hour at a cost of $0.60, expressing disbelief at the result.

On DeepSeek's own coding-agent benchmarks it beats Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol at about $0.20 per task, versus $2–$10 for frontier models on the same chart; independent evals are still pending.

Recreating the Tesla Roadster event in 3D voxels cost $0.89 with V4.1 Flash 1017 versus $1.07 with GPT-6 Luna, with a link to run it locally or via API.

On the same test, the roughly 90% cheaper V4.1 Flash 1017 Max produced better output than GPT 6.1 Sol Ultra with similar runtime, costing just 0.44 cents in API fees.

A user generated a video from a short prompt in DeepSeek's web chat mode and says V4.1-Flash-1017 is cheap and feels close to Opus 5.5.

A user unboxes a used RTX 3090, notes OpenCode made V4.1 Flash free, and hopes community optimization will let 1017 run locally on the card.

A ~210GB EXL3 quant with only about 2% code perplexity loss drops into the existing V4.1 Spark kit, though the new 1017 Engram tables must be pulled.

Web, app and API are all switched to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, still accessed as deepseek-flash with the same pricing, which the poster calls a fair deal.

Third-party gateway SPRO lists V4.1-Flash-1017 with 1M context, 393K output tokens, four reasoning levels, and $0.15/$0.60 per million input/output tokens.