DeepSeek

In March 2026, Lenny Rachitsky published an article with a telling headline: “Everyone should be using Claude Code”. It went viral on LinkedIn and tech newsletters, picked up hundreds of thousands of views, and now every week a manager somewhere asks: how do I try this?

The answer is uncomfortable. The Anthropic Max subscription that unlocks Claude Code costs $100 per month. That’s $1,200 a year for a single tool – before you’ve even figured out whether it fits your workflow. And it locks you into a single vendor, a single model, and a pricing tier designed for power users, not for someone exploring whether AI agents are worth the investment.

There’s a direct alternative. OpenCode is an open-source project that does exactly the same thing, works with any model (including free ones), and takes 15 minutes to set up.

We conducted a large-scale study: 52 models, evaluations from two independent LLM judges, across 8 categories of management tasks. This is the most comprehensive Russian-language AI ranking for managers available today.

The question remains the same: which AI actually works for a manager in Russia – without VPN, without workarounds?

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that has become one of the industry’s leading players in just two years. By February 2026, DeepSeek proved it can compete with ChatGPT and Claude in response quality while costing 10–30 times less.

At mysummit.school, we ran an experiment: we created a quiz with 11 pairs of texts where participants had to figure out which was written by a human and which by an AI. From June to December, 140 people completed the entire quiz. The results surprised us – and the participants.