DeepSeek-R1 Reasoning API: Production Guide with Chain-of-Thought (2026)

DeepSeek-R1 Reasoning API: Production Guide with Chain-of-Thought (2026) TL;DR: DeepSeek-R1 exposes its full chain-of-thought via API at $0.28/M tokens — roughly 9× cheaper than GPT-5.4 and 18× cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7. This guide shows you how to capture reasoning tokens, build production agent loops, and handle the edge cases that break naive implementations. What Makes DeepSeek-R1 Different Most LLMs are black boxes. You send a prompt, you get an answer, and you have no visibility into ho