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How I code with AI on a budget/free

wuu73.org

11–20 of 251 posts

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

#11
post #7

[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";

Site really needs to drop the completely unreadable backup font.

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

#12
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.

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

#13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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";

Site really needs to drop the completely unreadable backup font.

Commenters need to stop complaining and hit the reader mode button on their browsers.

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

#15

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.

Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits

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

#16
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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 ) 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

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

#18

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/a…

Is glm-4.5 air useable? I see it's free on Openrouter. Also pls advise what you think is the current best free openrouter model for coding. Thanks!

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

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Site really needs to drop the completely unreadable backup font.

Commenters need to stop complaining and hit the reader mode button on their browsers.

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.

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

#20
post #15

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.

Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits

Doesn't it swap to a lower power model after that?
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