Cheapest REA Setup YET! (Deepseek V4.1+LeanREA)
Star PandaCode on GitHub: https://github.com/aicodeking/pandacode Star LeanREA: https://github.com/aicodeking/leanrea Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/@aicodeking/join In this video, I'll show you a setup that still works now that Claude Code and Codex have started blocking REA style prompts, and it's way cheaper too. First I'll go over the three pieces: LeanREA, my 8 KB skill file that replaces REA's 207 tool MCP server, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, which got 81.25 percent on KingBench 3 and doesn't get scared by normal reverse engineering work, and PandaCode, which runs DeepSeek directly through its own harness, dsh. Then I'll compare the prices against Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 and estimate what my $2.17 LeanREA benchmark run would cost on DeepSeek. After that I'll set the whole thing up step by step and give it a real LeanREA task in PandaCode. Finally, I'll be honest about the downsides and tell you whether I think it's worth it. -- Key Takeaways: ⚠️ Claude Code and Codex have started blocking REA style prompts, even though much of this work is completely normal debugging and inspection. 🧠 LeanREA is one 8 KB skill file that replaces REA's 207 tool MCP server with the real local tools like asar, otool, nm, go version -m and jadx. 📊 In my Sonnet 5.5 benchmark, LeanREA was 38% faster than REA, 35% cheaper and used 56% fewer turns, with the same accuracy. 🔍 A simple OK reply used about 400,000 tokens with REA's tools loaded, versus about 34,000 with LeanREA. 🚀 DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scored 81.25% on KingBench 3 with thinking at max, tied with Gemini 3.8 Flash and above my older V4 Pro result. 💸 At off-peak hours V4.1 Flash costs 15 cents in and 60 cents out per million tokens, about 13x cheaper than Sonnet on input, almost 17x on output and about 67x on cached input. 💻 PandaCode runs DeepSeek directly through dsh: install it with npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh, add your key in Settings → Providers, pick V4.1 Flash and set thinking to max. ⚡ Install LeanREA with npx skills add aicodeking/leanrea, then type /leanrea, and the agent batches its checks into a few turns, marking each claim as seen, inferred or unknown. ✅ By my rough estimate, my $2.17 Sonnet run would come to around 16 or 17 cents on DeepSeek, though I haven't run that benchmark on DeepSeek yet. 👍 Opus 5.5 is still better on the hardest tasks and your code goes to DeepSeek's servers, but for this kind of work this setup just makes more sense.
