deepseek-cost-routerlisted

# Routing work to the right DeepSeek model DeepSeek exposes two behaviors through its OpenAI-compatible API: - **`deepseek-chat`** — the fast, non-thinking path. Cheap, low latency. - **`deepseek-reasoner`** — the thinking path (chain-of-thought before the final answer). Slower and pricier per call, dramatically better on hard reasoning. The routing skill: run routine volume on chat, escalate only reasoning-heavy work. ## Escalation heuristics Default to **chat** for: file edits driven by clear instructions, renames, boilerplate, doc updates, formatted output, summarization, simple lookups, bulk repetitive transformations. Escalate to **reasoner** for: non-obvious bugs (state/caching/async/race), algorithm design, architecture tradeoffs, tricky merges, math, contract or spec violations, "the tests fail and the cause is unclear". A cheap escalation ladder for agent harnesses that support it: 1. Try the task on chat with a tight instruction. 2. If the result fails review/tests, re-run just that unit on reasoner. 3. Feed the reasoner's answer back as the accepted fix; continue on chat. Escalating *units of failure* instead of whole sessions keeps the premium model's token share small. ## Cost mechanics worth knowing - **Context caching**: repeated identical prefixes (system prompt, long file context) hit DeepSeek's automatic prefix cache and are billed at the much cheaper cache-hit rate. Keep your system prompt and repo map *stable and first* in the prompt;