--- title: "DeepSeek-V4-Flash makes LLM steering interesting again" url: https://daily.dev/posts/deepseek-v4-flash-makes-llm-steering-interesting-again-0rujyanjx source_url: https://seangoedecke.com/steering-vectors type: article source: "sean goedecke" published: 2026-05-16T07:36:16.650Z updated: 2026-05-16T07:36:42.801Z tags: ["llm", "deepseek", "llama-cpp"] reading_time: 8 upvotes: 7 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # DeepSeek-V4-Flash makes LLM steering interesting again **[sean goedecke](https://daily.dev/sources/seangoedecke)** · 8 min read · 7 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary DeepSeek-V4-Flash, a local model competitive with low-end frontier models for agentic coding, makes LLM activation steering newly practical for engineers. The post explains how steering works — extracting concept vectors from model activations and boosting them during inference — and explores why it hasn't seen wider adoption: big labs don't need it, API users can't access weights, and basic use cases are outcompeted by prompting. The author is cautiously skeptical: most simple steering gains can be replicated with prompts, while ambitious goals like steering for 'intelligence' or codebase knowledge likely require full fine-tuning. However, with a capable open-weights local model now available, the open-source community may finally start exploring steering seriously, potentially producing libraries of boostable features alongside model releases. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#deepseek](https://daily.dev/tags/deepseek), [#llama-cpp](https://daily.dev/tags/llama-cpp) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/deepseek-v4-flash-makes-llm-steering-interesting-again-0rujyanjx)