I wonder how much energy this is wasting.
who cares. we can build more. energymaxx or the us will become like germany.
How I code with AI on a budget/free
41–50 of 251 posts
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#42To 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
Can you use your GH Copilot subscription with Zed to leverage the Copilot subscription-provided models?
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#43To 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
Zed is supreme but I have a need that Zed can’t scratch so I’m in VSCode :(
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also
Can you use your GH Copilot subscription with Zed to leverage the Copilot subscription-provided models?
Yes, you can. IIRC both for the assistant/agent and code completions.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#45> 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 w…
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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#46My 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 ag…
> (Well, "works"... OpenAI Codex took 200 requests with o4-mini to change like 3 lines of code...)
Let’s keep something in reason, I have multiple times in my life spent days on what would end up to be maybe three lines of code.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#47Windsurf has a good free model. Good enough for autocomplete level work for sure (haven't tried it for more as I use Claude Code)
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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're thinking of Facebook. A lot of companies run on Gmail and Google Docs (easy to verify with `dig MX [bigco].com`), and they would not if Google shared that data with anybody.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#49Windsurf has a good free model. Good enough for autocomplete level work for sure (haven't tried it for more as I use Claude Code)
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.
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.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#50Just use Rovodev CLI. Gives you 20 million tokens for free per 24 hours and you can switch between sonnet 4 / gpt-5.