DeepSeek quietly shipped a working agent harness on v4-flash.
Two things in it are real.
The one that works is web search. You declare it as a tool on their new responses endpoint and DeepSeek runs it on their own servers.
It is genuinely agentic: it does not just search, it opens the pages and reads them.
One question about an FA rule change ran 18 tool actions on its own and burned 74k input tokens before it answered. (Hobbit AI use case)
There is no separate search fee. The results simply arrive as ordinary input tokens.
Everything else is accepted and silently ignored.
Ask for a code interpreter, file search, computer use, image generation, MCP, or a local shell. Every one of them returns a clean 200 and does absolutely nothing.
Ask for background execution and the reply tells you it ran in the foreground.
Ask it to store the conversation and the reply tells you it stored nothing. Point it at a previous response id that does not exist and it raises no error at all.
Ask for reasoning summaries and the field comes back echoed, with the summary empty, every time. The endpoints for conversations, files, batches and containers are all 404.
Two things I would not have guessed.
OpenAI's name for the same tool, web_search_preview, is accepted and does nothing.
Only DeepSeek's own spelling, web_search, actually runs.
Typo it and your searches quietly stop, with no error anywhere to tell you.
And the limit on tool calls is not a limit.
Setting it to 1 gave 9 search actions. Setting it to 2 gave 7. Setting it to 8 gave 15. Leaving it off gave 18. It dampens the deep end, that is all it does.
One warning. Declare a tool that does not exist, ask something that needs a live lookup, and the model will answer you from memory while telling you it verified.
An OpenAI shaped shell with one cell filled in. This was almost certainly built for v4-pro.
It surfaced on flash first.
Day 8, DR move from 0 to 4.6 :
29 directories recorded, 11 live dofollow, 9 live nofollow, 4 submitted and never published, 1 the checker could not reach, 4 not checked yet.
Fee so far: $0.
Work so far: 10 minutes/day.
3 of the live ones sit on pages carrying noindex, so Google drops the page and the link stops counting.
Those look like wins in any tool that only reads rel.
I am not claiming the submissions moved the DR.
One site, no control group, and DR is Ahrefs' black box.
I am claiming these are the numbers, checked daily by the thing I am building.
#backlink #seo #dr
Launched ShipDR yesterday, I will be using it as a ShipDR product, tracking its Dr, publish daily changes.
Day 1: 10 backlinks live, 6 dofollow and 3 nofollow, 1 waiting for verification.
Fee: $0.
Backlinks DR as in pic.
I kept opening directory listings to check by eye whether a link was still there, which is exactly the thing I built ShipDR to stop doing.
So ShipDR now launches a free Chrome extension.
Three readings of the page you are already on:
any site's Domain Rating, on the toolbar icon;
what that listing actually gave you, including dofollow on a noindex page: looks like a win, passes nothing;
your saved answers typed into its submission form.
No account needed for the first two.
I made a backlink tracking tool since I can't find a cheap one when I tried to improve Hobbit's DR.
It's called ShipDR - https://t.co/Lju5ibpN3m
Every "best directories to submit your startup" list is somebody's opinion, and half of them are sponsored. ShipDR is built on a different unit: maker-proven.
A directory earns its place when a real maker submits a real product and our checker reads the listing page itself: backlink there, dofollow or not, indexable or not, still there tomorrow.
So the pool (454 directories, still increasing) shows what opinions can't: where makers actually got listed, what they really paid, and whether the free lane or the paid lane gives dofollow.
A directory cannot pay its way in. The only way to rank better here is to actually publish makers' backlinks.
Your own submissions run through the same machine: drops, nofollow flips, and noindex pages get caught instead of discovered months later, with your Ahrefs DR charted against every move.
No DR promises. DR is Ahrefs' black box. ShipDR verifies the work.
Come try it, help me improve it.
Launched ShipDR yesterday, I will be using it as a ShipDR product, tracking its Dr, publish daily changes.
Day 1: 10 backlinks live, 6 dofollow and 3 nofollow, 1 waiting for verification.
Fee: $0.
Backlinks DR as in pic.
Already did this.
Auth emails for Hobbit (signup confirm, password reset) run entirely on Cloudflare Email Sending via a Worker send_email binding, triggered by Supabase's Send Email Hook.
3000 free emails/mo. Killed a ~$30/mo bill.
SPF/DKIM auto-signed since the domain's already on CF DNS.
Zero friction.
One gotcha: you can only send from a domain on your CF DNS, and each from-address has to be whitelisted.
Magic-link/invite types you template yourself.
Otherwise it's a breeze.
Already did this.
Auth emails for Hobbit (signup confirm, password reset) run entirely on Cloudflare Email Sending via a Worker send_email binding, triggered by Supabase's Send Email Hook.
3000 free emails/mo. Killed a ~$30/mo bill.
SPF/DKIM auto-signed since the domain's already on CF DNS.
Zero friction.
One gotcha: you can only send from a domain on your CF DNS, and each from-address has to be whitelisted.
Magic-link/invite types you template yourself.
Otherwise it's a breeze.
Today I moved away from supabase for SubtitlesFast
supabase -> SQLite
I used supabase as an experiment last year. It was so easy to setup a db, few clicks barabim barabum and it's done
always thought that setting up db instance on server was a pain, passwords, permissions, friction in general
so supabase definitely reduced the friction
but holy shit, i never realised how much latency it added to my product
I moved to SQLite as per papa's @levelsio advice and my app is VISIBLY quicker on the frontend
RankGoat is already on SQLite and it's a breeze
also debugging with Claude is much easier now
note to self: keep it simple stupid
just remember to run regular backups to another server and you're golden
the next experiment is to try Cloudflare for email I think and shed the Postmark bill, anyone done this yet?
CODEX SKILL THAT FINDS YOUR STARTUP’S FIRST CUSTOMERS!
I made a Codex skill that analyzes your startup and finds potential customers from real public signals.
Paste your startup URL while Codex defines your ideal customer, searches public discussions, qualifies each prospect, and generates a polished report with personalized outreach openers.
-> ideal customer profile analysis
-> public pain + buying signal research
-> evidence-backed prospect shortlist
-> fit, timing + reachability scores
-> original source links for every prospect
-> personalized outreach openers
-> polished HTML report
-> one-command install
Install: npx --yes codex-first-customer-finder-skill
100% open source.
Repo in Bio.
CODEX SKILL THAT FINDS YOUR STARTUP’S FIRST CUSTOMERS!
I made a Codex skill that analyzes your startup and finds potential customers from real public signals.
Paste your startup URL while Codex defines your ideal customer, searches public discussions, qualifies each prospect, and generates a polished report with personalized outreach openers.
-> ideal customer profile analysis
-> public pain + buying signal research
-> evidence-backed prospect shortlist
-> fit, timing + reachability scores
-> original source links for every prospect
-> personalized outreach openers
-> polished HTML report
-> one-command install
Install: npx --yes codex-first-customer-finder-skill
100% open source.
Repo in Bio.