How I code with AI on a budget/free

#1

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

How I code with AI on a budget/free
wuu73.org

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#2

Post by swader999 » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#3

Post by CjHuber » Sat, Aug 09, 2025, 11:53 PM UTC

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

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#4

Post by GaggiX » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:08 AM UTC

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).

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#5

Post by cammikebrown » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

I wonder how much energy this is wasting.

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#6

Post by Havoc » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

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

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#7

Post by sestep » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

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";

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#8

Post by porlemni » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:20 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#9

Post by andai » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

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.

Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free

#10

Post by reactordev » Sun, Aug 10, 2025, 12:24 AM UTC

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.