What happened
I've been a heavy Claude Code user for months. I instrument everything through SigNoz so I have actual data, not vibes. For a long time, Anthropic was excellent — I consistently struggled to hit my token limits. That's the good problem.
Then something changed on Anthropic's side. I don't know exactly what, maybe extended thinking changes, maybe rate limit policy, maybe something else. But around April 17–18, a single /review-pr command started eating through more than half my 5-hour token window. My workflow didn't change. I run the same commands I've run for months. The model behavior did.
The result: Mon Apr 20 and Tue Apr 21, I was getting throttled repeatedly mid-session. Same work — implementation, code review, multi-agent orchestration. Just constantly hitting walls.
At 9:51am PDT today I switched Claude Code to deepseek-v4-pro:cloud via Ollama Cloud's $20/mo Pro plan. Here's what happened.
The data
Two metrics that matter: lines of code changed per hour (real output) and lines per million tokens (efficiency — how much code gets produced per unit of compute).
| Session | Avg tok/hr | Lines/hr | Lines/M-tok |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu Apr 16 — Anthropic at its best | 29,555,000 | 1,688 | 41.5 |
| Sat Apr 18 — something starting to shift | 14,640,000 | 717 | 35.0 |
| Mon Apr 20 — throttled, cutting out | 10,475,000 | 289 | 18.4 |
| Tue Apr 21 — throttled again | 12,860,000 | 431 | 22.3 |
| Today Apr 29 — Ollama Cloud / DeepSeek | 21,466,000 | 1,174 | 54.7 |
Mon and Tue weren't a different type of work. It was the same implementation and review work I've done for months. The throttling is what cut the output.
The part that floored me
DeepSeek on Ollama Pro is slower than Claude. My plan caps me at 3 concurrent cloud models. I regularly run 14+ parallel agents — church review swarms, dual-repo implementations, blog agents, the works. Today all of that had to queue.
And I still produced 1,174 lines/hr — nearly 70% of my best-ever Anthropic session, which had no concurrency limits and a faster model.
Compared to what Anthropic has been delivering this week: 2.7–4× more productive, with more constraints, on a plan that costs 10× less.
My honest takeaway
DeepSeek is better. Not "competitive." Not "surprisingly good for the price." Better. At least for the way I work — heavy parallelism, large codebases, long multi-agent sessions.
Anthropic's Claude used to be the clear answer for me. Thursday's session proves it can still hit those peaks. But whatever changed in the past week has made it unusable for my workflow at the rate limits they're enforcing. DeepSeek through Ollama Cloud doesn't have that problem.
$200/mo → $20/mo. More productive. Less friction.
I'll keep tracking the data and post a follow-up after a full week.