Cline: Average Turns per Task Nearly Doubles as DeepSeek V4.1-Flash Slashes Cost
Key Info
Cline reports that the average number of interaction turns per task nearly doubled—from 26 in March to 50 in August—and credits cost efficiencies from models like DeepSeek V4.1-Flash for letting users take on larger autonomous jobs.
Highlights
- Average turns per task in Cline rose from 26 in March to 50 in August, a roughly 2x increase in five months.
- Cline attributes this to cheaper frontier models, specifically pointing to DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, which reportedly beats DeepSeek V4-Pro 0813 less than a month after release.
- Priced at $0.30/$1.20 per 1M input/output tokens, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash costs about 1/20th of Opus 5, 1/17th of GPT-5.6 Sol, and 1/12th of Kimi K3—while outperforming all three on Terminal-Bench.