I wonder how much energy this is wasting.
Right - free to you maybe.
How I code with AI on a budget/free
31–40 of 251 posts
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#32To 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.
I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#34I 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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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!
Well, if you download Qwen Code https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code it is free up to 2000 api calls a day.
Not sure if GLM-4.5 Air is good, but non-Air one is fabulous. I know for free API access there is pollinations ai project. Also llm7. If you just use the web chat's you can use most of the best models for free without API. There are ways to 'emulate' an API automatically.. I was thinking about adding this to my aicodeprep-gui app so it could automatically paste and then cut. Some MCP servers exist that you can use and it will automatically paste or cut from those web chat's and route it to an API interface.
OpenAI offers free tokens for most models, 2.5mil or 250k depending on model. Cerebras has some free limits, Gemini... Meta has plentiful free API for Llama 4 because.. lets face it, it sucks, but it is okay/not bad for stuff like summarizing text.
If you really wanted to code for exactly $0 you could use pollinations ai, in Cline extension (for VS Code) set to use "openai-large" (which is GPT 4.1). If you plan using all the best web chat's like Kimi K2, z.ai's GLM models, Qwen 3 chat, Gemini in AI Studio, OpenAI playground with o3 or o4-mini. You can go forever without being charged money. Pollinations 'openai-large' works fine in Cline as an agent to edit files for you etc.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#35I 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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#36If 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
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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#37I wonder how much energy this is wasting.
Probably not as much as you think: 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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Well, if you download Qwen Code https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code it is free up to 2000 api calls a day. Not sure if GLM-4.5 Air is good, but non-Air one is fabulous. I know for free API access there is pollinations ai project. Also llm7. If you just use the web chat's you can use most of the best models for free without API. There are ways to 'emulate' an API automatically.. I was thinking about adding this to my…
Very cool, a lot to chew on here. Thanks so much for the feedback!
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#39If 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.
I'm assuming it isn't sensitive for your purposes, but note that Google will train on these interactions, but not if you pay.
I agree, Google is definitely the champion of respecting your privacy. Will definitely not train their model on your data if you pay them. I mean you should definitely just film yourself and give them everything, access to your files, phone records, even bank accounts. Just make sure to pay them those measly $200 and absolutely they will not share that data with anybody.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#40> 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.