About R1...

I'm a dev with 30+ years of experience and more than a year coding with AI's of various versions. I've spent 2 solid days working with R1 on a large, complex monorepo with 2 NextJS projects, a shared PostgreSQL db project and an Express server.

I'll keep it short and sweet.

Yes, it's half the price of Sonnet. But I spend MORE than twice the time I do with Sonnet to accomplish the same code changes. It struggles. It forgets. It gets confused. So even though it's half the price, you spend more than twice the time jacking with it than you do with Sonnet so you end up paying more in the long run AND developing slower.

I love the DeepSeek R1 chat. I love discussing architectural design with it. I love seeing it's thinking because it's a cool insight to their thought processes. But for coding on a large project with lots of dependencies and interconnected code across multiple projects, it's not up to the task.

And I don't say this because I'm happy. I would have loved for it to be the one. It's just not there yet.

If you're building simple little SPAs, it's probably fine. But add in authentication, a database, multiple pages, multiple projects, forget about it.