W̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶o̶p̶h̶?̶ We found him and now we talk about AI

[dannytaurus]

@iamlamprey said in Where's Christoph?:

I use Deepseek Flash and the combination works as well or better than any standard Claude / Codex setups at 1/100th the price.

Is that a subscription or API calls?

You can't really compare DeepSeek API costs with the token usage you get bundled in a Claude or Codex subscription, especially if you're driving it hard.

Comparing directly to Claude/Codex API isn't fair either, since the vast majority of heavy Claude/Codex users are on a subscription and wouldn't dream of paying API prices for those models/harnesses.

[dannytaurus]

@iamlamprey said in Where's Christoph?:

Caveat in case someone thinks I'm stealing their .ch1 files with my "ch1 extractor" - I'm building out an MVP to see if I can convert my existing sample libraries into a synth and I can't be bothered downloading the original sample files lol

Don't worry - code and digital asset privacy is a thing of the past too.

It's always been possible to do all the reverse engineering that's all the rage now - the decompile libraries have been around for years. It's just that now LLMs bring us two things we didn't have before: speed and accuracy, and both at a much lower cost than hiring a human.

[Lindon]

@dannytaurus said in Where's Christoph?:

@Lindon said in Where's Christoph?:

I recall there was some stuff mentioned a few months back but Im pretty sure its out of date now...

That's why I'm hesitant to post anything along the lines of guide or instructions.

Things are moving so fast that anyone reading after a few weeks will be out of date.

But yes, a high-level config/setup would be good. Things like CLAUDE.md files, memory, etc. have always been around and will likely remain in place until the next big shift.

yeah thats what everyone says..so we all end up with nothing. Which is WORSE than out of date

[dannytaurus]

@Lindon said in Where's Christoph?:

yeah thats what everyone says..so we all end up with nothing. Which is WORSE than out of date

Well, since you asked so nicely I'll write something up to post later.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus I'm still using Claude code in the browser, is there any advantage to accessing it from a desktop app, other than local file access?

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Given how it sounds like you use Claude, might not be too different.

If you only use Claude to propose/write/update code that you then read and edit, doing it in the browser works fine.

But working in a browser means your agent is running just in the repo, on an isolated cloud instance.

Using the desktop app (or the CLI as I prefer) is all local, so Claude can:

• launch HISE itself, run the hise-cli, Projucer, pluginval, auval, even launch a DAW
• run the local MCP for API lookups
• run the edit/recompile/screenshot loop with the HISE REST server for UI tweaks
• work in any folder on your machine, not just the project repo: the samples, AppData folder, etc.
• use your existing local credentials so you don't have to put duplicates in the browser

[iamlamprey]

@dannytaurus said in Where's Christoph? We found him and now we talk about AI:

Is that a subscription or API calls?

API, I also have strata running the Qwen flash 110b locally but my system is the "bare minimum" so it's not super reliable.

The Chinese models are all distilled from Claude / GPT anyway, they just focus more on optimization via KV cache tweaks or attention trickery, hence why they're so cheap. Deepseek recently published their entire inference engine for running models at scale, and I think the Kimi team posted the full training run of their latest model, including the costs which is pretty cool.

I've also been training a tiny (<10m param) dual-mamba model designed to fetch information at runtime instead of storing it in the weights, getting it to form coherent sentences for the first time was cool to see :D

[dannytaurus]

@iamlamprey said in Where's Christoph? We found him and now we talk about AI:

getting it to form coherent sentences for the first time was cool to see :D

Yeah, I bet!

Have you tried headroom with your setup? Might make it even cheaper. Or have you got that kind of functionality built in?

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Excellent title edit. Shame the title formatter doesn't do strikethrough.

Try these:
W̶h̶e̶r̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶o̶p̶h̶?̶
W̷h̷e̷r̷e̷'̷s̷ ̷C̷h̷r̷i̷s̷t̷o̷p̷h̷?̷

Seems like Godwin's Law needs updating to AI instead of Hitler

[iamlamprey]

@dannytaurus said in Where's Christoph? We found him and now we talk about AI:

Have you tried headroom with your setup? Might make it even cheaper. Or have you got that kind of functionality built in?

I haven't seen headroom before but some of it is already in the harness. Output tokens are really the ones to watch out for, overly verbose replies or doom-spiraling can bump up the price. That being said I do need to sort out the context compaction, it fails sometimes which means the full chat history gets sent to the model and that can cost a bit more.