10 ms·

How I code with AI on a budget/free

697 points by indigodaddy 1y ago

swader999 1y ago
[flagged]
- sestep 1y ago
  You probably only saw the cursive backup font and not the intended Roboto font that the page actually uses (which took about half a second to load for me); here's a snippet from the CSS: font-family: "Roboto", "Underdog", cursive, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";
  - adastra22 1y ago
    Site really needs to drop the completely unreadable backup font.
    - dangus 1y ago
      Commenters need to stop complaining and hit the reader mode button on their browsers.
      - nosioptar 1y ago
        Reader mode isn't an option for me on this page using Firefox mobile. The better solution is that web devs and designers should either stop changing fonts or learn how to do so without making peoples' eyes bleed.
        skeledrew 1y ago
        > Reader mode isn't an option for me on this page using Firefox mobile. It is for me. Page was great when I opened it in Telegram browser (my default) though, and then I saw the crazy when I opened in Firefox.
      - bravesoul2 1y ago
        UA's FTW.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        Not all browsers have a reader mode. And for the record I usually don’t like these design-related comments, but it was literally unreadable. Like some sort of 17th century chicken scratch cursive.
CjHuber 1y ago
Without tricks google aistudio definitely has limits, though pretty high ones. gemini.google.com on the other hand has less than a handful of free 2.5 pro messages for free
GaggiX 1y ago
OpenAI offering 2.5M free tokens daily small models and 250k for big ones (tier 1-2) is so useful for random projects, I use them to learn japanese for example (by having a program that list informations about what the characters are just saying: vocabulary, grammar points, nuances).
cammikebrown 1y ago
I wonder how much energy this is wasting.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Untradable carbon tax (or carbon price for people who hate the T word) is needed.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- robotsquidward 1y ago
  Right - free to you maybe.
- yen223 1y ago
  Probably not as much as you think: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand You are better off worrying about your car use and your home heating/cooling efficiency, all of which are significantly worse for energy use.
  - kasabali 1y ago
    > You’ll notice that this figure is for 2022, and we’ve had a major AI boom since then I might as well read LLM gibberish instead of this article.
- sergiotapia 1y ago
  who cares. we can build more. energymaxx or the us will become like germany.
- nimmi003 1y ago
  [dead]
Havoc 1y ago
For anyone else confused - there is a page 2 and 3 in the post that you need to access via arrow thing at bottom.
porlemni 1y ago
[flagged]
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  You could get them all to idly chat to each other.
andai 1y ago
My experience lines up with the article. The agentic stuff only works with the biggest models. (Well, "works"... OpenAI Codex took 200 requests with o4-mini to change like 3 lines of code...) For simple changes I actually found smaller models better because they're so much faster. So I shifted my focus from "best model" to "stupidest I can get away with". I've been pushing that idea even further. If you give up on agentic, you can go surgical. At that point even 100x smaller models can handle it. Just tell it what to do and let it give you the diff. Also I found the "fumble around my filesystem" approach stupid for my scale, where I can mostly fit the whole codebase into the context. So I just dump src/ into the prompt. (Other people's projects are a lot more boilerplatey so I'm testing ultra cheap models like gpt-oss-20b for code search. For that, I think you can go even cheaper...) Patent pending.
- statenjason 1y ago
  Aider as a non-agentic coding tool strikes a nice balance on the efficiency vs effectiveness front. Using tree-sitter to create a repo map of the repository means less filesystem digging. No MCP, but shell commands mean it can use utilities I myself am familiar with. Combined with Cerebras as a provider, the turnaround on prompts is instant; I can stay involved rather than waiting on multiple rounds of tool calls. It's my go-to for smaller scale projects.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    It's a shame MCP didn't end up using a sandboxed shell (or something similar, maybe even simpler.) All the pre-MCP agents I built just talked to the shell directly since the models are already trained to do that.
  - stillsut 1y ago
    Just added a fork of aider that does do agentic commands: https://github.com/sutt/agent-aider https://github.com/sutt/agent-aider In testing I've found it to be underwhelming at being an agent compared to claude code, wrote up some case-studies on it here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/aba-vidstr-2.md#agentic-behavior https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...
reactordev 1y ago
To the OP: I highly recommend you look into Continue.dev and ollama/lmstudio and running models on your own. Some of them are really good at autocomplete-style suggestions while others (like gpt-oss) can reason and use tools. It's my goto copilot.
- navbaker 1y ago
  Same! I’ve been using Continue in VSCode and found most of the bigger Qwen models plus gpt-oss-120b to be great in agentic mode!
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Do you use openrouter models with continue?
    - navbaker 1y ago
      No, but only because our work has to be done on-prem, so we use our self-hosted LLM deployments. If that weren’t a limitation we would for sure
- AstroBen 1y ago
  I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Can you use your GH Copilot subscription with Zed to leverage the Copilot subscription-provided models?
    - nechuchelo 1y ago
      Yes, you can. IIRC both for the assistant/agent and code completions.
  - reactordev 1y ago
chromaton 1y ago
If you're looking for free API access, Google offers access to Gemini for free, including for gemini-2.5-pro with thinking turned on. The limit is... quite high, as I'm running some benchmarking and haven't hit the limit yet. Open weight models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-OSS are also made available with free API access from various inference providers and hardware manufacturers.
- gooosle 1y ago
  Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits
  - tomrod 1y ago
    Doesn't it swap to a lower power model after that?
    - acjacobson 1y ago
      Not automatically but you can switch to a lower power model and access more free requests. I think Gemini 2.5 Flash is 250 requests per day.
  - panarky 1y ago
    I'm getting consistently good results with Gemini CLI and the free 100 requests per day and 6 million tokens per day. Note that you'll need to either authorize with a Google Account or with an API key from AI Studio, just be sure the API key is from an account where billing is disabled. Also note that there are other rate limits for tokens per request and tokens per minute on the free plan that effectively prevent you from using the whole million token context window. It's good to exit or /clear frequently so every request doesn't resubmit your entire history as context or you'll use up the token limits long before you hit 100 requests in a day.
- chiwilliams 1y ago
  I'm assuming it isn't sensitive for your purposes, but note that Google will train on these interactions, but not if you pay.
radio879 1y ago
I am the person that wrote that. Sorry about the font. This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed. More models so I will try to update that. Every month so many new models come out. My new fav is GLM-4.5... Kimi K2 is also good, and Qwen3-Coder 480b, or 2507 instruct.. very good as well. All of those work really well in any agentic environment/in agent tools. I made a context helper app ( https://wuu73.org/aicp https://wuu73.org/aicp ) which is linked to from there which helps jump back and forth from all the different AI chat tabs i have open (which is almost always totally free, and I get the best output from those) to my IDE. The app tries to remove all friction, and annoyances, when you are working with the native web chat interfaces for all the AIs. Its free and has been getting great feedback, criticism welcome. It helps the going from IDE <----> web chat tabs. Made it for myself to save time and I prefer the UI (PySide6 UI so much lighter than a webview) Its got Preset buttons to add text that you find yourself typing very often, per-project state saves of window size of app and which files were used for context. So next time, it opens at same state. Auto scans for code files, guesses likely ones needed, prompt box that can put the text above and below the code context (seems to help make the output better). One of my buttons is set to: "Write a prompt for Cline, the AI coding agent, enclose the whole prompt in a single code tag for easy copy and pasting. Break the tasks into some smaller tasks with enough detail and explanations to guide Cline. Use search and replace blocks with plain language to help it find where to edit" What i do for problem solving, figuring out bugs: I'm usually in VS Code and i type aicp in terminal to open the app. Fine tune any files already checked, type what i am trying to do or what problem i have to fix, click Cline button, click Generate Context!. Paste into GLM-4.5, sometimes o3 or o4-mini, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro.. if its a super hard thing i'll try 2 or 3 models. I'll look and see which one makes the most sense and just copy and paste into Cline in VS Code - set to GPT 4.1 which is unlimited/free.. 4.1 isn't super crazy smart or anything but it follows orders... it will do whatever you ask, reliably. AND, it will correct minor mistakes from the bigger model's output. The bigger smarter models can figure out the details, and they'll write a prompt that is a task list with how-to's and why's perfect for 4.1 to go and do in agent mode.... You can code for free this way unlimited, and its the smartest the models will be. Anytime you throw some tools or MCPs at a model it dumbs them down.... AND you waste money on all the API costs having to use Claude 4 for everything
- 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bravesoul2 1y ago
Windsurf has a good free model. Good enough for autocomplete level work for sure (haven't tried it for more as I use Claude Code)
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Assuming you have to at least be logged into a windsurf account though?
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Yeah. I didn't see not logged in as a requirement.
- b2m9 1y ago
  You mean SWE-1? I used it like a dozen times and I gave up because the responses were so bad. Not even sure whether it’s good enough for autocomplete because it’s the slowest model I’ve tested in a while.
  - bravesoul2 1y ago
    Not my experience for slowness. For smartness I am typically using it for simple "not worth looking that up" stuff rather than even feature implementation. Got it to write some MySQL SQL today, for example.
andrewmcwatters 1y ago
I jump between Claude Sonnet 4 on GitHub Copilot Pro and now GPT-5 on ChatGPT. That seems to get me pretty far. I have gpt-oss:20b installed with ollama, but haven't found a need to use it yet, and it seems like it just takes too long on an M1 Max MacBook Pro 64GB. Claude Sonnet 4 is pretty exceptional. GPT-4.1 asks me too frequently if it wants to move forward. Yes! Of course! Just do it! I'll reject your changes or do something else later. The former gets a whole task done. I wonder if anyone is getting better results, or comparable for cheaper or free. GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code is so good, I think it'd be pretty hard to beat, but I haven't tried other integrated editors.
- radio879 1y ago
  What are you using GPT 4.1 with, anything? I find that it will follow your instructions REALLY well, so maybe whatever you are using it in, there is a problem with the prompt. Something might be telling it to do that. It really does do whatever you tell it (but you might not be able to see the full prompt if you are using GPT 4.1 with some kind of other tool/not raw). Using it in Cline (free VS Code extension) it does exactly what it is told to do, I will have a bigger/smarter model figure out plans for it. It will edit files and just do stuff but its not really the model to think or plan etc.
joshdavham 1y ago
> When you use AI in web chat's (the chat interfaces like AI Studio, ChatGPT, Openrouter, instead of thru an IDE or agent framework) are almost always better at solving problems, and coming up with solutions compared to the agents like Cline, Trae, Copilot.. Not always, but usually. I completely agree with this! While I understand that it looks a little awkward to copy and paste your code out of your IDE and into a web chat interface, I generally get better results that way than with GitHub copilot or cursor.
- SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  100% opposite experience. Whether agentic, not… it’s all about context. Either agentic with access to your whole project, “lives” in GitHub, a fine tune, or RAG, or whatever… having access to all of the context drastically reduces hallucinations. There is a big difference between “write x” and “write x for me in my style, with all y dependencies, and considering all z code that exists around it”. I’m honestly not understand a defense of copy and paste AI coding… this is why agents are so massively popular right now.
  - b2m9 1y ago
    I’m also surprised by this take. I found copy/paste between editor and external chats to be way less helpful. That being said, I think everyone has probably different expectations and workflows. So if that’s what works for them, who am I to judge?
  - chazhaz 1y ago
    Agreed that it’s all about context — but my experience is that pasting into web chat allows me to manage context much more than if I drop the whole project/whole filesystem into context. With the latter approach the results tend to be hit-and-miss as the model tries to guess what’s right. All about context!
- saejox 1y ago
  I also agree with this. While the ai has less context, you have more context using the limited chat window. You know what you need from the ai.
hgarg 1y ago
Just use Rovodev CLI. Gives you 20 million tokens for free per 24 hours and you can switch between sonnet 4 / gpt-5.
- sumedh 1y ago
  What is the catch?
  - ireadmevs 1y ago
    > Beta technology disclaimer > Rovo Dev in the CLI is a beta product under active development. We can only support a certain number of users without affecting the top-notch quality and user experience we are known for providing. Once we reach this limit, we will create a waiting list and continue to onboard users as we increase capacity. This product is available for free while in beta. From https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Rovo-for-Software-Teams-Beta/Introducing-Rovo-Dev-CLI-AI-Powered-Development-in-your-terminal/ba-p/3043623 https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Rovo-for-Software-Tea...
    - indigodaddy 1y ago
      Isn't this only available to a current Jira cloud/service subscription?
xvv 1y ago
As of today, what is the best local model that can be run on a system with 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram?
- v5v3 1y ago
  Start with Qwen of a size that fits in the vram.
- ethan_smith 1y ago
  DeepSeek Coder 33B or Llama 3 70B with GGUF quantization (Q4_K_M) would be optimal for your specs, with Mistral Large 2 providing the best balance of performance and resource usage.
- fwystup 1y ago
  Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-FP8 is a good choice ('qwen3-coder:30b' when you use ollama). I have also had good experiences with https://mistral.ai/news/devstral https://mistral.ai/news/devstral (built under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI)
yichuan 1y ago
I think there’s huge potential for a fully local “Cursor-like” stack — no cloud, no API keys, just everything running on your machine. The setup could be: • Cursor CLI for agentic/dev stuff (example:https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724 https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724) • A local memory layer compatible with the CLI — something like LEANN (97% smaller index, zero cloud cost, full privacy, https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN) or Milvus (though Milvus often ends up cloud/token-based) • Your inference engine, e.g. Ollama, which is great for running OSS GPT models locally With this, you’d have an offline, private, and blazing-fast personal dev+AI environment. LEANN in particular is built exactly for this kind of setup — tiny footprint, semantic search over your entire local world, and Claude Code/ Cursor –compatible out of the box, the ollama for generation. I guess this solution is not only free but also does not need any API. But I do agree that this need some effort to set up, but maybe someone can make these easy and fully open-source
- airtonix 1y ago
  it might be free, private, blazing fast (if you choose a model with appropriate parameters to match your GPU). but you'll quickly notice that it's not even close to matching the quality of output, thought and reflecting that you'd get from running the same model but significantly high parameter count on a GPU capable of providing over 128gb of actual vram. There isn't anything available locally that will let me load a 128gb model and provide anything above 150tps The only thing that local ai model makes sense for right now seems to be Home Assistant in order to replace your google home/alexis. happy to be proven wrong, but the effort to reward just isn't there for local ai.
  - PeterStuer 1y ago
    Because most of the people squeezing that highly quantized small model into their consumer gpu don't get how they have left no room for the activation weights, and are stuck with a measly small context.
- andylizf 1y ago
  [flagged]
qustrolabe 1y ago
I bet it's crazy to some people that others okay with giving up so much of their data for free tiers. Like yeah it's better to selfhost but it takes so much resources to run good enough LLM at home that I'd rather give up my code for some free usage, anyway that code eventually will end up open source
- jama211 1y ago
  And as far as I’m concerned if my work is happy for me to use models to assist with code, then it’s not my problem
tonyhart7 1y ago
I replicate SDD from kiro code, it works wonder for multi switching model because I can just re fetch from specs folder
gexla 1y ago
Wow, there's a lot here that I didn't know about. Just never drilled that far into the options presented. For a change, I'm happy that I read the article rather than only the comments on HN. ;) And lots of helpful comments here on HN as well. Good job everyone involved. ;)
sublinear 1y ago
This all sounds a lot more complicated and time consuming than just writing the damn code yourself.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hoerzu 1y ago
To stop tab switching I built an extension to query all free models all at once: https://llmcouncil.github.io/llmcouncil/ https://llmcouncil.github.io/llmcouncil/
- nolist_policy 1y ago
  But isn't it in the extension store?
- unixfox 1y ago
  Is it possible to have the source code? I see that there is a github icon at the bottom of the page but it doesn't work.
bambax 1y ago
As the post says, the problem with coding agents is they send a lot of their own data + almost your entire code base for each request: that's what makes them expensive. But when used in a chat the costs are so low as to be insignificant. I only use OpenRouter which gives access to almost all models. Sonnet was my favorite until I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is almost always better. It can be quite slow though. So for basic questions / syntax reminders I just use Gemini Flash: super fast, and good for simple tasks.
worik 1y ago
A lot of work to evaluate these models. Thank you
- radio879 1y ago
  I don't like or love many things in life, but something about AI triggered that natural passion I had when I was first learning to code as a kid. Its just super fun. Coding without AI stopped being fun looong time ago. Unlucky brain or genetics maybe. AI sped up the dopamine feedback iteration loop to where my brain can really feel it again. I can get an idea in my head and just an hour later, have it 80% done and functioning. That gives me motivation, I won't get bored of the idea before I write the code.. which is what would happen a lot. Halfway done, get bored, then don't wanna continue.. AI fixed that
chvid 1y ago
Slightly off topic: What are good open weight models for coding that run well on a macbook?
nottorp 1y ago
Was the page done with AI? The scrolling is kinda laggy. Firefox/m3 pro.
- radio879 1y ago
  yeah i tried fixing it - the websites were more of an afterthought or annoying thing i had to do and definitely did it way too fast
  - mmmlinux 1y ago
    You mean none of your 20 browser tabs of free AIs could manage to make a website responsive?
    - radio879 1y ago
      this website is an after thought, i did NOT spend much time on it, like, at all. Its more like "ugh, i guess i should share what I know" and try to do it too fast so I can get back to the thing I want to do/having fun with
Weetile 1y ago
I'd love to see a thread that also takes advantage of student offers - for example, GitHub Copilot is free for university and college students
precompute 1y ago
I only use LLMs as a substitute for stackexchange, and sometimes to write boilerplate code. The free chat provided by deepseek works very well for me, and I've never encountered any usage limits. V3 / R1 are mostly sufficient. When I need something better (not very often), I use Claude's free tier. If you really need another model / a custom interface, it's better to use openrouter: deposit $10 and you get 1000 free queries/day across all free models. That $10 will be good for a few months, at the very least.
NKosmatos 1y ago
Now all we need is a wrapper/UI/manager/aggregator for all these "free" AI tools/pages so that we can use them without going into the hassle of changing tabs ;-)
burgerone 1y ago
Why are people still drawn to using pointless AI assistants for everything? What time do we save by making the code quality worse overall?
- ashirviskas 1y ago
  The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that this formula was "delivery > quality". It's also why almost no one writes assembly for production. Or C, and we get tons of bloated electron apps. (If it was not clear, I have no love for JS and I never really programmed in it, but you have to admit, it did allow us to have more stuff. Even if 99% of it should be torched by fire if evaluated purely from engineering perspective)
  - xwolfi 1y ago
    JS is cool because the browser interprets it to show nice effects on website. AI agents are pointless
hoppp 1y ago
The chatgpt free tier doesn't seem to expire unlike claude or mistral ai, they just downgrade it to a different model
jstummbillig 1y ago
Let's just be honest about what it is we actually do: The more people maximize what they can get for free, the more other people will have to shoulder the higher costs or limitations that follow. That's completely fine, not trying to pass judgement – but that's certainly not "free" unless you mean exactly "free for me, somebody else pays".
brokegrammer 1y ago
These tricks are a little too much for me. I'd rather just write the code myself instead of opening 20 tabs with different LLM chats each. However, I'd like to mention a tool called repomix (https://repomix.com/ https://repomix.com/), which will pack your code into a single file that can be fed to an LLM's web chat. I typically feed it to Qwen3 Coder or AI Studio with good results.
- linhan_dot_dev 1y ago
  I feel the same way, so this post inspired me to think about "how to improve intelligence." If I encounter a problem that's difficult to solve (and more automated tools like Claude Code can't solve it), I might try to package the source code context and send it separately to the LLM chat window. This approach can reduce the length of the context.
Oras 1y ago
OP must be a master of context switching! I can’t imagine opening that number of tabs and still focus
- funkydata 1y ago
  Also, well, I mean... If there's all that time/effort involved... Just get yourself some tea, coffee, doodle on some piece of paper, do some push-ups, some yoga, prey, meditate, breathe and then... Code, lol!
- radio879 1y ago
  Honestly there just isn't any alternative - the quality I get from this method is just better.. and often times, less than that level of quality just sucks too much and in the long run takes up more time. But I am trying some of the new CLI agent tools lately and some of them seem pretty good so far... It will take me time to really compare it though.
3036e4 1y ago
Maybe optimistic, but reading posts like this makes me hopeful that AI-assisted coding will drive people to design more modular and sanely organized code, to reduce the amount of context required for each task. Sadly pretty much all code I have worked with have been giant messes of everything being connected to everything else, causing the entire project to be potential context for anything.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  LLMs will write code this way if you ask but you have to know to ask.
  - casparvitch 1y ago
    At that(/what) point does it become harder for a human to grok a project?
    - mathiaspoint 1y ago
      That's always how it works no matter how good the model is. I'm surprised people keep forgetting this. If no one has the theory then the artifacts are almost unmaintainable. You can end up doing this with entirely human written code too. Good software devs can see it from a mile away.
    - saratogacx 1y ago
      It depends if you're willing to drop the $30 for the super version :)
- epolanski 1y ago
  It does, you're essentially forced to write good coding guidelines and documentation.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  It's really very good at that. Frequently, I'll have something I've been working on over the years that has turned into an interconnected mess. "Split this code into modules of separated concerns". Bam, done. I used Claude for the first time last week and gave it a 2k line PowerShell script and it neatly pulled it apart into 5 working modules on the first try. Worked exactly the same, and ended up with better comments too.
5kyn3t 1y ago
Why is Mistral not mentioned. Is there any reason? I have the impression that they are often ignored by media, bloggers, devs when it comes to comparing or showcasing LLM thingies. Comes with free tier and quality is quite good. (But I am not an AI power user) https://chat.mistral.ai/chat https://chat.mistral.ai/chat
- epolanski 1y ago
  Off topic but I use Mistral in production for various one shot tasks (mostly summarizing), it's incredibly cheap, fast and effective. Bonus: it's European, kinda tired of giving always money to the American overlords.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  Becase Mistral is very bad, Qwen, Kimi and GLM are just better.
- radio879 1y ago
  I have used it, but I just haven't found it good when I have, maybe its gotten better. I have it as one of the free models in a chrome extension I was working on since I keep a list of tons of free APIs, just there are so many options and I tend to just use the top 5-10 best ones (that I have noticed as being great)
jug 1y ago
It’s not free FREE but if you deposit at least $10 on OpenRouter, you can use their free models without credit withdrawals. And those models are quite powerful, like DeepSeek R1. Sometimes, they are rate limited by the provider due to their popularity but it works in a pinch.
- PufPufPuf 1y ago
  Actually nowadays they allow unlimited usage of free models without depositing anything.
codeclimber 1y ago
Nice write-up, especially the point about mixing different models for different stages of coding. I’ve been tracking which IDE/CLI tools give free or semi-free access to pro-grade LLMs (e.g., GPT-5, Claude code, Gemini 2.5 Pro) and how generous their quotas are. Ended up putting them side-by-side so it’s easier to compare hours, limits, and gotchas: https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Ai studio using https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/ is unlimited. I also use kiro which I got access for completely free because I was early on seeing kiro and actually trying it out because of hackernews! Sometimes I use cerebras web ui to get insanely fast token generation of things like gpt-oss or qwen 480 b or qwen in general too. I want to thank hackernews for kiro! I mean, I am really grateful to this platform y'know. Not just for free stuff but in general too. Thanks :>
scosman 1y ago
The qwen coder CLI gives you 1000 free requests per day to the qwen coder model (405b). Probably the best free option right now.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  Qwen cli uses whole file edit format which is slow and burns credits fast same is issue with gemini cli.
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Do opencode/crush also have this problem?
    - chrismustcode 1y ago
      I use opencode and never experienced it going through tokens at the speed I experienced Gemini CLI go through. Cant speak to qwen or crush as I have not used them
gkoos 1y ago
Looks like somebody is a tad bit over reliant on these tools but other than that there is a lot of value in this article
imasl42 1y ago
You might find this repo helpful, it compares popular coding tools by hours with top-tier LLMs like Claude Sonnet: https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding
matrixhelix 1y ago
https://claude.ai https://claude.ai https://chat.z.ai https://chat.z.ai https://chatgpt.com https://chatgpt.com https://chat.qwen.ai https://chat.qwen.ai https://chat.mistral.ai https://chat.mistral.ai https://chat.deepseek.com https://chat.deepseek.com https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com https://dashboard.cohere.com https://dashboard.cohere.com https://copilot.microsoft.com https://copilot.microsoft.com
iLoveOncall 1y ago
This is nightmarish, whether or not you like LLMs. Just use Amazon Q Dev for free which will cover every single area that you need in every context that you need (IDE, CLI, etc.).
- radio879 1y ago
  nice try, bot. I just don't like Amazon anything. I am onto their long term game. They will give you free stuff, wait til its burned into your mind, then slowly raise the price or add annoying marketing trickery bs. Or lawyer-designed bs to trap you. I just don't want to live in that world.
DrSiemer 1y ago
Ha, I'm working on a similar tool: https://github.com/DrSiemer/codemerger https://github.com/DrSiemer/codemerger Glad to see I'm not the only one who prefers to work like that. I don't need many different models though, the free version of Gemini 2.5 Pro is usually enough for me. Especially the 1.000.000 token context length is really useful. I can just keep dumping full code merges in. I'll have a look at the alternatives mentioned though. Some questions just seem to throw certain models into logic loops.
- radio879 1y ago
  There has got to be probably 100 of these tools by now, yours is the only other one that has a UI that I have found. Lot of people all get the same idea eventually.. we all run into the same problems eventually
zwnow 1y ago
All the AI corps have a free model, thats enough to use it for free no?
personjerry 1y ago
It's another advertisement article
heraldgeezer 1y ago
Kinda reads like old style blog but worse but good tips. Also grok disclaimer lol
Liftyee 1y ago
Sidenote: On the second page, the 2nd and 4th paragraphs seem duplicated?
- radio879 1y ago
  totally sped thru vibe adding stuff lol whoops.. some stuff got a little messed up
Pugsy99 1y ago
This is really useful, thank you so much
Ingaz 1y ago
What's funny: the whole article reminds me something Emacs-ish in spirit. Fascination in combination of interesting tools with very interesting tools in a very very unconventional workflow. I like it. I'm certain that I will not use the same workflow but it gave me ideas for my own.
radio879 1y ago
I know this 'guide' is really raw and messy, but it seems that people prefer it that way. It doesn't sound AI generated and like.. when people try way too hard to sound like LinkedIn posts. I felt like I did some of it that way on purpose just because I kind of like it myself.. like it sounds ridiculous but funny calling it "my smart juice theory", but I don't really want to change that LOL. I know it could use some real clean up though. Not enough time in a day...

697 points by indigodaddy 1y ago

swader999 1y ago

[flagged]

sestep 1y ago
You probably only saw the cursive backup font and not the intended Roboto font that the page actually uses (which took about half a second to load for me); here's a snippet from the CSS: font-family: "Roboto", "Underdog", cursive, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";
- adastra22 1y ago
  Site really needs to drop the completely unreadable backup font.
  - dangus 1y ago
    Commenters need to stop complaining and hit the reader mode button on their browsers.
    - nosioptar 1y ago
      Reader mode isn't an option for me on this page using Firefox mobile. The better solution is that web devs and designers should either stop changing fonts or learn how to do so without making peoples' eyes bleed.
      - skeledrew 1y ago
        > Reader mode isn't an option for me on this page using Firefox mobile. It is for me. Page was great when I opened it in Telegram browser (my default) though, and then I saw the crazy when I opened in Firefox.
    - bravesoul2 1y ago
      UA's FTW.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      Not all browsers have a reader mode. And for the record I usually don’t like these design-related comments, but it was literally unreadable. Like some sort of 17th century chicken scratch cursive.

CjHuber 1y ago

Without tricks google aistudio definitely has limits, though pretty high ones. gemini.google.com on the other hand has less than a handful of free 2.5 pro messages for free

GaggiX 1y ago

OpenAI offering 2.5M free tokens daily small models and 250k for big ones (tier 1-2) is so useful for random projects, I use them to learn japanese for example (by having a program that list informations about what the characters are just saying: vocabulary, grammar points, nuances).

cammikebrown 1y ago

I wonder how much energy this is wasting.

bravesoul2 1y ago
Untradable carbon tax (or carbon price for people who hate the T word) is needed.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
robotsquidward 1y ago
Right - free to you maybe.
yen223 1y ago
Probably not as much as you think: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/ai-energy-demand You are better off worrying about your car use and your home heating/cooling efficiency, all of which are significantly worse for energy use.
- kasabali 1y ago
  > You’ll notice that this figure is for 2022, and we’ve had a major AI boom since then I might as well read LLM gibberish instead of this article.
sergiotapia 1y ago
who cares. we can build more. energymaxx or the us will become like germany.
nimmi003 1y ago
[dead]

Havoc 1y ago

For anyone else confused - there is a page 2 and 3 in the post that you need to access via arrow thing at bottom.

porlemni 1y ago

[flagged]

bravesoul2 1y ago
You could get them all to idly chat to each other.

andai 1y ago

My experience lines up with the article. The agentic stuff only works with the biggest models. (Well, "works"... OpenAI Codex took 200 requests with o4-mini to change like 3 lines of code...) For simple changes I actually found smaller models better because they're so much faster. So I shifted my focus from "best model" to "stupidest I can get away with". I've been pushing that idea even further. If you give up on agentic, you can go surgical. At that point even 100x smaller models can handle it. Just tell it what to do and let it give you the diff. Also I found the "fumble around my filesystem" approach stupid for my scale, where I can mostly fit the whole codebase into the context. So I just dump src/ into the prompt. (Other people's projects are a lot more boilerplatey so I'm testing ultra cheap models like gpt-oss-20b for code search. For that, I think you can go even cheaper...) Patent pending.

statenjason 1y ago
Aider as a non-agentic coding tool strikes a nice balance on the efficiency vs effectiveness front. Using tree-sitter to create a repo map of the repository means less filesystem digging. No MCP, but shell commands mean it can use utilities I myself am familiar with. Combined with Cerebras as a provider, the turnaround on prompts is instant; I can stay involved rather than waiting on multiple rounds of tool calls. It's my go-to for smaller scale projects.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  It's a shame MCP didn't end up using a sandboxed shell (or something similar, maybe even simpler.) All the pre-MCP agents I built just talked to the shell directly since the models are already trained to do that.
- stillsut 1y ago
  Just added a fork of aider that does do agentic commands: https://github.com/sutt/agent-aider https://github.com/sutt/agent-aider In testing I've found it to be underwhelming at being an agent compared to claude code, wrote up some case-studies on it here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/aba-vidstr-2.md#agentic-behavior https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/case-studies/a...

reactordev 1y ago

To the OP: I highly recommend you look into Continue.dev and ollama/lmstudio and running models on your own. Some of them are really good at autocomplete-style suggestions while others (like gpt-oss) can reason and use tools. It's my goto copilot.

navbaker 1y ago
Same! I’ve been using Continue in VSCode and found most of the bigger Qwen models plus gpt-oss-120b to be great in agentic mode!
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Do you use openrouter models with continue?
  - navbaker 1y ago
    No, but only because our work has to be done on-prem, so we use our self-hosted LLM deployments. If that weren’t a limitation we would for sure
AstroBen 1y ago
I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Can you use your GH Copilot subscription with Zed to leverage the Copilot subscription-provided models?
  - nechuchelo 1y ago
    Yes, you can. IIRC both for the assistant/agent and code completions.
- reactordev 1y ago

chromaton 1y ago

If you're looking for free API access, Google offers access to Gemini for free, including for gemini-2.5-pro with thinking turned on. The limit is... quite high, as I'm running some benchmarking and haven't hit the limit yet. Open weight models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-OSS are also made available with free API access from various inference providers and hardware manufacturers.

gooosle 1y ago
Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits
- tomrod 1y ago
  Doesn't it swap to a lower power model after that?
  - acjacobson 1y ago
    Not automatically but you can switch to a lower power model and access more free requests. I think Gemini 2.5 Flash is 250 requests per day.
- panarky 1y ago
  I'm getting consistently good results with Gemini CLI and the free 100 requests per day and 6 million tokens per day. Note that you'll need to either authorize with a Google Account or with an API key from AI Studio, just be sure the API key is from an account where billing is disabled. Also note that there are other rate limits for tokens per request and tokens per minute on the free plan that effectively prevent you from using the whole million token context window. It's good to exit or /clear frequently so every request doesn't resubmit your entire history as context or you'll use up the token limits long before you hit 100 requests in a day.
chiwilliams 1y ago
I'm assuming it isn't sensitive for your purposes, but note that Google will train on these interactions, but not if you pay.

radio879 1y ago

I am the person that wrote that. Sorry about the font. This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed. More models so I will try to update that. Every month so many new models come out. My new fav is GLM-4.5... Kimi K2 is also good, and Qwen3-Coder 480b, or 2507 instruct.. very good as well. All of those work really well in any agentic environment/in agent tools. I made a context helper app ( https://wuu73.org/aicp https://wuu73.org/aicp ) which is linked to from there which helps jump back and forth from all the different AI chat tabs i have open (which is almost always totally free, and I get the best output from those) to my IDE. The app tries to remove all friction, and annoyances, when you are working with the native web chat interfaces for all the AIs. Its free and has been getting great feedback, criticism welcome. It helps the going from IDE <----> web chat tabs. Made it for myself to save time and I prefer the UI (PySide6 UI so much lighter than a webview) Its got Preset buttons to add text that you find yourself typing very often, per-project state saves of window size of app and which files were used for context. So next time, it opens at same state. Auto scans for code files, guesses likely ones needed, prompt box that can put the text above and below the code context (seems to help make the output better). One of my buttons is set to: "Write a prompt for Cline, the AI coding agent, enclose the whole prompt in a single code tag for easy copy and pasting. Break the tasks into some smaller tasks with enough detail and explanations to guide Cline. Use search and replace blocks with plain language to help it find where to edit" What i do for problem solving, figuring out bugs: I'm usually in VS Code and i type aicp in terminal to open the app. Fine tune any files already checked, type what i am trying to do or what problem i have to fix, click Cline button, click Generate Context!. Paste into GLM-4.5, sometimes o3 or o4-mini, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro.. if its a super hard thing i'll try 2 or 3 models. I'll look and see which one makes the most sense and just copy and paste into Cline in VS Code - set to GPT 4.1 which is unlimited/free.. 4.1 isn't super crazy smart or anything but it follows orders... it will do whatever you ask, reliably. AND, it will correct minor mistakes from the bigger model's output. The bigger smarter models can figure out the details, and they'll write a prompt that is a task list with how-to's and why's perfect for 4.1 to go and do in agent mode.... You can code for free this way unlimited, and its the smartest the models will be. Anytime you throw some tools or MCPs at a model it dumbs them down.... AND you waste money on all the API costs having to use Claude 4 for everything

1y ago

deleted 1y ago

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bravesoul2 1y ago

Windsurf has a good free model. Good enough for autocomplete level work for sure (haven't tried it for more as I use Claude Code)

indigodaddy 1y ago
Assuming you have to at least be logged into a windsurf account though?
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Yeah. I didn't see not logged in as a requirement.
b2m9 1y ago
You mean SWE-1? I used it like a dozen times and I gave up because the responses were so bad. Not even sure whether it’s good enough for autocomplete because it’s the slowest model I’ve tested in a while.
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  Not my experience for slowness. For smartness I am typically using it for simple "not worth looking that up" stuff rather than even feature implementation. Got it to write some MySQL SQL today, for example.

andrewmcwatters 1y ago

I jump between Claude Sonnet 4 on GitHub Copilot Pro and now GPT-5 on ChatGPT. That seems to get me pretty far. I have gpt-oss:20b installed with ollama, but haven't found a need to use it yet, and it seems like it just takes too long on an M1 Max MacBook Pro 64GB. Claude Sonnet 4 is pretty exceptional. GPT-4.1 asks me too frequently if it wants to move forward. Yes! Of course! Just do it! I'll reject your changes or do something else later. The former gets a whole task done. I wonder if anyone is getting better results, or comparable for cheaper or free. GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code is so good, I think it'd be pretty hard to beat, but I haven't tried other integrated editors.

radio879 1y ago
What are you using GPT 4.1 with, anything? I find that it will follow your instructions REALLY well, so maybe whatever you are using it in, there is a problem with the prompt. Something might be telling it to do that. It really does do whatever you tell it (but you might not be able to see the full prompt if you are using GPT 4.1 with some kind of other tool/not raw). Using it in Cline (free VS Code extension) it does exactly what it is told to do, I will have a bigger/smarter model figure out plans for it. It will edit files and just do stuff but its not really the model to think or plan etc.

joshdavham 1y ago

> When you use AI in web chat's (the chat interfaces like AI Studio, ChatGPT, Openrouter, instead of thru an IDE or agent framework) are almost always better at solving problems, and coming up with solutions compared to the agents like Cline, Trae, Copilot.. Not always, but usually. I completely agree with this! While I understand that it looks a little awkward to copy and paste your code out of your IDE and into a web chat interface, I generally get better results that way than with GitHub copilot or cursor.

SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
100% opposite experience. Whether agentic, not… it’s all about context. Either agentic with access to your whole project, “lives” in GitHub, a fine tune, or RAG, or whatever… having access to all of the context drastically reduces hallucinations. There is a big difference between “write x” and “write x for me in my style, with all y dependencies, and considering all z code that exists around it”. I’m honestly not understand a defense of copy and paste AI coding… this is why agents are so massively popular right now.
- b2m9 1y ago
  I’m also surprised by this take. I found copy/paste between editor and external chats to be way less helpful. That being said, I think everyone has probably different expectations and workflows. So if that’s what works for them, who am I to judge?
- chazhaz 1y ago
  Agreed that it’s all about context — but my experience is that pasting into web chat allows me to manage context much more than if I drop the whole project/whole filesystem into context. With the latter approach the results tend to be hit-and-miss as the model tries to guess what’s right. All about context!
saejox 1y ago
I also agree with this. While the ai has less context, you have more context using the limited chat window. You know what you need from the ai.

hgarg 1y ago

Just use Rovodev CLI. Gives you 20 million tokens for free per 24 hours and you can switch between sonnet 4 / gpt-5.

sumedh 1y ago
What is the catch?
- ireadmevs 1y ago
  > Beta technology disclaimer > Rovo Dev in the CLI is a beta product under active development. We can only support a certain number of users without affecting the top-notch quality and user experience we are known for providing. Once we reach this limit, we will create a waiting list and continue to onboard users as we increase capacity. This product is available for free while in beta. From https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Rovo-for-Software-Teams-Beta/Introducing-Rovo-Dev-CLI-AI-Powered-Development-in-your-terminal/ba-p/3043623 https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Rovo-for-Software-Tea...
  - indigodaddy 1y ago
    Isn't this only available to a current Jira cloud/service subscription?

xvv 1y ago

As of today, what is the best local model that can be run on a system with 32gb of ram and 24gb of vram?

v5v3 1y ago
Start with Qwen of a size that fits in the vram.
ethan_smith 1y ago
DeepSeek Coder 33B or Llama 3 70B with GGUF quantization (Q4_K_M) would be optimal for your specs, with Mistral Large 2 providing the best balance of performance and resource usage.
fwystup 1y ago
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-FP8 is a good choice ('qwen3-coder:30b' when you use ollama). I have also had good experiences with https://mistral.ai/news/devstral https://mistral.ai/news/devstral (built under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI)

yichuan 1y ago

I think there’s huge potential for a fully local “Cursor-like” stack — no cloud, no API keys, just everything running on your machine. The setup could be: • Cursor CLI for agentic/dev stuff (example:https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724 https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724) • A local memory layer compatible with the CLI — something like LEANN (97% smaller index, zero cloud cost, full privacy, https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN) or Milvus (though Milvus often ends up cloud/token-based) • Your inference engine, e.g. Ollama, which is great for running OSS GPT models locally With this, you’d have an offline, private, and blazing-fast personal dev+AI environment. LEANN in particular is built exactly for this kind of setup — tiny footprint, semantic search over your entire local world, and Claude Code/ Cursor –compatible out of the box, the ollama for generation. I guess this solution is not only free but also does not need any API. But I do agree that this need some effort to set up, but maybe someone can make these easy and fully open-source

airtonix 1y ago
it might be free, private, blazing fast (if you choose a model with appropriate parameters to match your GPU). but you'll quickly notice that it's not even close to matching the quality of output, thought and reflecting that you'd get from running the same model but significantly high parameter count on a GPU capable of providing over 128gb of actual vram. There isn't anything available locally that will let me load a 128gb model and provide anything above 150tps The only thing that local ai model makes sense for right now seems to be Home Assistant in order to replace your google home/alexis. happy to be proven wrong, but the effort to reward just isn't there for local ai.
- PeterStuer 1y ago
  Because most of the people squeezing that highly quantized small model into their consumer gpu don't get how they have left no room for the activation weights, and are stuck with a measly small context.
andylizf 1y ago
[flagged]

qustrolabe 1y ago

I bet it's crazy to some people that others okay with giving up so much of their data for free tiers. Like yeah it's better to selfhost but it takes so much resources to run good enough LLM at home that I'd rather give up my code for some free usage, anyway that code eventually will end up open source

jama211 1y ago
And as far as I’m concerned if my work is happy for me to use models to assist with code, then it’s not my problem

tonyhart7 1y ago

I replicate SDD from kiro code, it works wonder for multi switching model because I can just re fetch from specs folder

gexla 1y ago

Wow, there's a lot here that I didn't know about. Just never drilled that far into the options presented. For a change, I'm happy that I read the article rather than only the comments on HN. ;) And lots of helpful comments here on HN as well. Good job everyone involved. ;)

sublinear 1y ago

This all sounds a lot more complicated and time consuming than just writing the damn code yourself.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

hoerzu 1y ago

To stop tab switching I built an extension to query all free models all at once: https://llmcouncil.github.io/llmcouncil/ https://llmcouncil.github.io/llmcouncil/

nolist_policy 1y ago
But isn't it in the extension store?
unixfox 1y ago
Is it possible to have the source code? I see that there is a github icon at the bottom of the page but it doesn't work.

bambax 1y ago

As the post says, the problem with coding agents is they send a lot of their own data + almost your entire code base for each request: that's what makes them expensive. But when used in a chat the costs are so low as to be insignificant. I only use OpenRouter which gives access to almost all models. Sonnet was my favorite until I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is almost always better. It can be quite slow though. So for basic questions / syntax reminders I just use Gemini Flash: super fast, and good for simple tasks.

worik 1y ago

A lot of work to evaluate these models. Thank you

radio879 1y ago
I don't like or love many things in life, but something about AI triggered that natural passion I had when I was first learning to code as a kid. Its just super fun. Coding without AI stopped being fun looong time ago. Unlucky brain or genetics maybe. AI sped up the dopamine feedback iteration loop to where my brain can really feel it again. I can get an idea in my head and just an hour later, have it 80% done and functioning. That gives me motivation, I won't get bored of the idea before I write the code.. which is what would happen a lot. Halfway done, get bored, then don't wanna continue.. AI fixed that

chvid 1y ago

Slightly off topic: What are good open weight models for coding that run well on a macbook?

nottorp 1y ago

Was the page done with AI? The scrolling is kinda laggy. Firefox/m3 pro.

radio879 1y ago
yeah i tried fixing it - the websites were more of an afterthought or annoying thing i had to do and definitely did it way too fast
- mmmlinux 1y ago
  You mean none of your 20 browser tabs of free AIs could manage to make a website responsive?
  - radio879 1y ago
    this website is an after thought, i did NOT spend much time on it, like, at all. Its more like "ugh, i guess i should share what I know" and try to do it too fast so I can get back to the thing I want to do/having fun with

Weetile 1y ago

I'd love to see a thread that also takes advantage of student offers - for example, GitHub Copilot is free for university and college students

precompute 1y ago

I only use LLMs as a substitute for stackexchange, and sometimes to write boilerplate code. The free chat provided by deepseek works very well for me, and I've never encountered any usage limits. V3 / R1 are mostly sufficient. When I need something better (not very often), I use Claude's free tier. If you really need another model / a custom interface, it's better to use openrouter: deposit $10 and you get 1000 free queries/day across all free models. That $10 will be good for a few months, at the very least.

NKosmatos 1y ago

Now all we need is a wrapper/UI/manager/aggregator for all these "free" AI tools/pages so that we can use them without going into the hassle of changing tabs ;-)

burgerone 1y ago

Why are people still drawn to using pointless AI assistants for everything? What time do we save by making the code quality worse overall?

ashirviskas 1y ago
The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that this formula was "delivery > quality". It's also why almost no one writes assembly for production. Or C, and we get tons of bloated electron apps. (If it was not clear, I have no love for JS and I never really programmed in it, but you have to admit, it did allow us to have more stuff. Even if 99% of it should be torched by fire if evaluated purely from engineering perspective)
- xwolfi 1y ago
  JS is cool because the browser interprets it to show nice effects on website. AI agents are pointless

hoppp 1y ago

The chatgpt free tier doesn't seem to expire unlike claude or mistral ai, they just downgrade it to a different model

jstummbillig 1y ago

Let's just be honest about what it is we actually do: The more people maximize what they can get for free, the more other people will have to shoulder the higher costs or limitations that follow. That's completely fine, not trying to pass judgement – but that's certainly not "free" unless you mean exactly "free for me, somebody else pays".

brokegrammer 1y ago

These tricks are a little too much for me. I'd rather just write the code myself instead of opening 20 tabs with different LLM chats each. However, I'd like to mention a tool called repomix (https://repomix.com/ https://repomix.com/), which will pack your code into a single file that can be fed to an LLM's web chat. I typically feed it to Qwen3 Coder or AI Studio with good results.

linhan_dot_dev 1y ago
I feel the same way, so this post inspired me to think about "how to improve intelligence." If I encounter a problem that's difficult to solve (and more automated tools like Claude Code can't solve it), I might try to package the source code context and send it separately to the LLM chat window. This approach can reduce the length of the context.

Oras 1y ago

OP must be a master of context switching! I can’t imagine opening that number of tabs and still focus

funkydata 1y ago
Also, well, I mean... If there's all that time/effort involved... Just get yourself some tea, coffee, doodle on some piece of paper, do some push-ups, some yoga, prey, meditate, breathe and then... Code, lol!
radio879 1y ago
Honestly there just isn't any alternative - the quality I get from this method is just better.. and often times, less than that level of quality just sucks too much and in the long run takes up more time. But I am trying some of the new CLI agent tools lately and some of them seem pretty good so far... It will take me time to really compare it though.

3036e4 1y ago

Maybe optimistic, but reading posts like this makes me hopeful that AI-assisted coding will drive people to design more modular and sanely organized code, to reduce the amount of context required for each task. Sadly pretty much all code I have worked with have been giant messes of everything being connected to everything else, causing the entire project to be potential context for anything.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
LLMs will write code this way if you ask but you have to know to ask.
- casparvitch 1y ago
  At that(/what) point does it become harder for a human to grok a project?
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    That's always how it works no matter how good the model is. I'm surprised people keep forgetting this. If no one has the theory then the artifacts are almost unmaintainable. You can end up doing this with entirely human written code too. Good software devs can see it from a mile away.
  - saratogacx 1y ago
    It depends if you're willing to drop the $30 for the super version :)
epolanski 1y ago
It does, you're essentially forced to write good coding guidelines and documentation.
bongodongobob 1y ago
It's really very good at that. Frequently, I'll have something I've been working on over the years that has turned into an interconnected mess. "Split this code into modules of separated concerns". Bam, done. I used Claude for the first time last week and gave it a 2k line PowerShell script and it neatly pulled it apart into 5 working modules on the first try. Worked exactly the same, and ended up with better comments too.

5kyn3t 1y ago

Why is Mistral not mentioned. Is there any reason? I have the impression that they are often ignored by media, bloggers, devs when it comes to comparing or showcasing LLM thingies. Comes with free tier and quality is quite good. (But I am not an AI power user) https://chat.mistral.ai/chat https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

epolanski 1y ago
Off topic but I use Mistral in production for various one shot tasks (mostly summarizing), it's incredibly cheap, fast and effective. Bonus: it's European, kinda tired of giving always money to the American overlords.
sunaookami 1y ago
Becase Mistral is very bad, Qwen, Kimi and GLM are just better.
radio879 1y ago
I have used it, but I just haven't found it good when I have, maybe its gotten better. I have it as one of the free models in a chrome extension I was working on since I keep a list of tons of free APIs, just there are so many options and I tend to just use the top 5-10 best ones (that I have noticed as being great)

jug 1y ago

It’s not free FREE but if you deposit at least $10 on OpenRouter, you can use their free models without credit withdrawals. And those models are quite powerful, like DeepSeek R1. Sometimes, they are rate limited by the provider due to their popularity but it works in a pinch.

PufPufPuf 1y ago
Actually nowadays they allow unlimited usage of free models without depositing anything.

codeclimber 1y ago

Nice write-up, especially the point about mixing different models for different stages of coding. I’ve been tracking which IDE/CLI tools give free or semi-free access to pro-grade LLMs (e.g., GPT-5, Claude code, Gemini 2.5 Pro) and how generous their quotas are. Ended up putting them side-by-side so it’s easier to compare hours, limits, and gotchas: https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

Ai studio using https://aistudio.google.com/ https://aistudio.google.com/ is unlimited. I also use kiro which I got access for completely free because I was early on seeing kiro and actually trying it out because of hackernews! Sometimes I use cerebras web ui to get insanely fast token generation of things like gpt-oss or qwen 480 b or qwen in general too. I want to thank hackernews for kiro! I mean, I am really grateful to this platform y'know. Not just for free stuff but in general too. Thanks :>

scosman 1y ago

The qwen coder CLI gives you 1000 free requests per day to the qwen coder model (405b). Probably the best free option right now.

faangguyindia 1y ago
Qwen cli uses whole file edit format which is slow and burns credits fast same is issue with gemini cli.
- indigodaddy 1y ago
  Do opencode/crush also have this problem?
  - chrismustcode 1y ago
    I use opencode and never experienced it going through tokens at the speed I experienced Gemini CLI go through. Cant speak to qwen or crush as I have not used them

gkoos 1y ago

Looks like somebody is a tad bit over reliant on these tools but other than that there is a lot of value in this article

imasl42 1y ago

You might find this repo helpful, it compares popular coding tools by hours with top-tier LLMs like Claude Sonnet: https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding

matrixhelix 1y ago

https://claude.ai https://claude.ai https://chat.z.ai https://chat.z.ai https://chatgpt.com https://chatgpt.com https://chat.qwen.ai https://chat.qwen.ai https://chat.mistral.ai https://chat.mistral.ai https://chat.deepseek.com https://chat.deepseek.com https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com https://dashboard.cohere.com https://dashboard.cohere.com https://copilot.microsoft.com https://copilot.microsoft.com

iLoveOncall 1y ago

This is nightmarish, whether or not you like LLMs. Just use Amazon Q Dev for free which will cover every single area that you need in every context that you need (IDE, CLI, etc.).

radio879 1y ago
nice try, bot. I just don't like Amazon anything. I am onto their long term game. They will give you free stuff, wait til its burned into your mind, then slowly raise the price or add annoying marketing trickery bs. Or lawyer-designed bs to trap you. I just don't want to live in that world.

DrSiemer 1y ago

Ha, I'm working on a similar tool: https://github.com/DrSiemer/codemerger https://github.com/DrSiemer/codemerger Glad to see I'm not the only one who prefers to work like that. I don't need many different models though, the free version of Gemini 2.5 Pro is usually enough for me. Especially the 1.000.000 token context length is really useful. I can just keep dumping full code merges in. I'll have a look at the alternatives mentioned though. Some questions just seem to throw certain models into logic loops.

radio879 1y ago
There has got to be probably 100 of these tools by now, yours is the only other one that has a UI that I have found. Lot of people all get the same idea eventually.. we all run into the same problems eventually

zwnow 1y ago

All the AI corps have a free model, thats enough to use it for free no?

personjerry 1y ago

It's another advertisement article

heraldgeezer 1y ago

Kinda reads like old style blog but worse but good tips. Also grok disclaimer lol

Liftyee 1y ago

Sidenote: On the second page, the 2nd and 4th paragraphs seem duplicated?

radio879 1y ago
totally sped thru vibe adding stuff lol whoops.. some stuff got a little messed up

Pugsy99 1y ago

This is really useful, thank you so much

Ingaz 1y ago

What's funny: the whole article reminds me something Emacs-ish in spirit. Fascination in combination of interesting tools with very interesting tools in a very very unconventional workflow. I like it. I'm certain that I will not use the same workflow but it gave me ideas for my own.

radio879 1y ago

I know this 'guide' is really raw and messy, but it seems that people prefer it that way. It doesn't sound AI generated and like.. when people try way too hard to sound like LinkedIn posts. I felt like I did some of it that way on purpose just because I kind of like it myself.. like it sounds ridiculous but funny calling it "my smart juice theory", but I don't really want to change that LOL. I know it could use some real clean up though. Not enough time in a day...