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How I code with AI on a budget/free

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

#61

Post by racecar789 »

radio879 wrote: post #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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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/a…

Small recommendation: The diagrams on [https://wuu73.org/aicp] are helpful, but clicking them does not display the full‑resolution images; they appear blurry. This occurs in both Firefox and Chrome. In the GitHub repository, the same images appear sharp at full resolution, so the issue may be caused by the JavaScript rendering library.

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

#62

Post by PeterStuer »

radio879 wrote: post #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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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/a…

Very nice article and thx for the update.

I would be very interested in an in dept of your experiences of differences between Roo Code and Cline if you feel you can share that. I've only tried Roo Code (with interesting but mixed results) thus far.

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

#63

Post by PeterStuer »

racecar789 wrote: post #61
radio879 wrote: post #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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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/a…

Small recommendation: The diagrams on [ https://wuu73.org/aicp ] are helpful, but clicking them does not display the full‑resolution images; they appear blurry. This occurs in both Firefox and Chrome. In the GitHub repository, the same images appear sharp at full resolution, so the issue may be caused by the JavaScript rendering library.

Another data point: On Android Chrome they render without problem.

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

#64

Post by radio879 »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #59
radio879 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

bro you are final boss of free tier users lol

damn right !!!!

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

#65

Post by teiferer »

radio879 wrote: post #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/a…

> You can code for free this way

vs

> If you set your account's data settings to allow OpenAI to use your data for model training

So, it's not "for free".

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

#66

Post by devjab »

chiwilliams wrote: post #26
chromaton wrote: post #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.

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 think it'll be hard to find a LLM that actually respects your privacy regardless whether or not you pay. Even with the "privacy" enterprise Co-Pilot from Microsoft with all their promises of respecting your data, it's still not deemed safe enough by leglislation to be used in part of the European energy sector. The way we view LLM's on any subscription is similar to how I imagine companies in the USA views Deepseek. Don't put anything into them you can't afford to share with the world. Of course with the agents, you've probably given them access to everything on your disk.

Though to be fair, it's kind of silly how much effort we go through to protect our mostly open source software from AI agents, while at the same time, half our OT has build in hardware backdoors.

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

#67

Post by radio879 »

AstroBen wrote: post #32
reactordev wrote: post #10

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.

I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also

really - no monthly subscriptions? i hate those but i am fine with bringing my own API URLs etc and paying. I'm building a router that will track all the free tokens from all the different providers and auto rotate them when daily tokens or time limits run out.

Continue and Zed.. gonna check them out, prompts in Cline are too long. I was thinking of just making my own VS Code extension but I need to try Claude Code with GLM 4.5 (heard it pairs nicely)

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

#68

Post by wahnfrieden »

andai wrote: post #9

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 ag…

They don't allow model switching below GPT-5 in codex cli anymore (without API key), because it's not recommended. Try it with thinking=high and it's quite an improvement from o4-mini. o4-mini is more like gpt-5-thinking-mini but they don't allow that for codex. gpt-5-thinking-high is more like o1 or maybe o3-pro.

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

#69

Post by hpincket »

andai wrote: post #9

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 ag…

I am developing the same opinion. I want something fast and dependable. Getting into a flow state is important to me, and I just can't do that when I'm waiting for an agentic coding assistant to terminate.

I'm also interested in smaller models for their speed. That, or a provider like Cerebras.

Then, if you narrow the problem domain you can increase the dependability. I am curious to hear more about your "surgical" tools.

I rambled about this on my blog about a week ago: https://hpincket.com/what-would-the-vim-of-llm-tooling-look-...

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

#70

Post by gexla »

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. ;)

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