deepseek-workers
DeepSeek models as cheap agentic workers for Claude Code. Mechanical tasks (bulk edits, conversions, boilerplate) get delegated to DeepSeek's API — billed cents to your DeepSeek balance instead of Claude-plan tokens. Judgment work stays on Claude.
How it works: DeepSeek exposes an Anthropic-compatible endpoint, so a plain
claude -p pointed at it becomes a full agentic worker (tools, file edits)
running on deepseek-v4-flash / deepseek-v4-pro. A routing rule in your
global CLAUDE.md makes every session — subagents included — delegate
mechanical chunks there automatically.
Install
You need: Claude Code, and a DeepSeek API key (https://platform.deepseek.com, top up a few dollars).
In Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add Szpili/deepseek-workers
/plugin install deepseek-workers@deepseek-workers
Then run the setup skill and follow along:
/deepseek-workers:setup
Setup installs ~/.local/bin/dsclaude, stores your key in
~/.config/deepseek/key, adds the routing rule to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md,
allowlists the command, and runs a live end-to-end test.
Manual use
dsclaude -p "convert these 40 config files from JSON to YAML"
DSMODEL=deepseek-v4-pro dsclaude -p "harder mechanical task"
Gotchas
- **401 "Your api key: **xxxx is invalid" — that masked value is your
Claude OAuth token, not the DeepSeek key. The wrapper avoids this with its
own config dir (
~/.claude-deepseek); never log in there. - Slow at peak — DeepSeek queues can add minutes of latency. Use generous timeouts (≥300s) and background runs. It's cheap, not fast.
- Both models are reasoners (thinking tokens count against output).