DeepSeek V4-Flash Tool Loop: A Coding Agent for Cents

Build a Coding Agent for the Price of a Rounding Error

On July 31, 2026 DeepSeek shipped V4-Flash, and the number that broke developer timelines was the price tag: $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output, behind an OpenAI-compatible endpoint with a 1M-token context window. That is roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper on output than the closed flagships, while still holding its own on real coding tasks. Suddenly, the “let an LLM read and edit my files in a loop” pattern that used to feel like a luxury costs about a tenth of a cent per run.