Deepseek wants to take on Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex with "Deepseek Code"

Deepseek is building a Claude Code competitor. The Chinese AI company is setting up a new "Harness" team in Beijing to build its own code agent from scratch, working title "Deepseek Code." Deli Chen from Deepseek posted the job listings on X. "Harness" refers to everything beyond the model itself: tool use, planning, and memory. The core idea: model plus harness equals AI agent. We break this down in our AI Radar #1 on AI agents.

The company is hiring a product manager and a developer, both heavy users of tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or GitHub Copilot. They'll work closely with the model research team. The product manager owns the roadmap, runs feedback analysis, and builds a community. Candidates should know agent loops, MCP, multi-agent systems, and context engineering. Experience with "vibe coding" is expected too.

Deepseek is positioning the project at the intersection of research and product, in direct competition with Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Cursor.