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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

#121

Post by radio879 »

dcuthbertson wrote: post #115
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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…

FYI: the first AI you link to, " z.ai's GLM 4.5", actually links to zai.net, which appears to be a news site, instead of "chat.z.ai", which is what I think you intended.

oops. was using AI trying to fix some of the bugs and update it real fast with some newer models, since this post was trending here. Hopefully its scrolling better. Link fixed. I know its still ridiculous looking with some of the page but at least its readable for now.

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

#123

Post by jstummbillig »

Let's just be honest about what it is we actually do: The more people maximize what they can get for free, the more other people will have to shoulder the higher costs or limitations that follow. That's completely fine, not trying to pass judgement – but that's certainly not "free" unless you mean exactly "free for me, somebody else pays".

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

#124

Post by maxiepoo »

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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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…

do you really have 20+ tabs of LLMs open at a time?

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

#125

Post by PeterStuer »

airtonix wrote: post #54
yichuan wrote: post #53

I think there’s huge potential for a fully local “Cursor-like” stack — no cloud, no API keys, just everything running on your machine. The setup could be: • Cursor CLI for agentic/dev stuff (example: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724 ) • A local memory layer compatible with the CLI — something like LEANN (97% smaller index, zero cloud cost, full privacy, https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN ) or Milvus…

it might be free, private, blazing fast (if you choose a model with appropriate parameters to match your GPU). but you'll quickly notice that it's not even close to matching the quality of output, thought and reflecting that you'd get from running the same model but significantly high parameter count on a GPU capable of providing over 128gb of actual vram. There isn't anything available locally that will let me load…

Because most of the people squeezing that highly quantized small model into their consumer gpu don't get how they have left no room for the activation weights, and are stuck with a measly small context.

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

#126

Post by oblio »

andylizf wrote: post #94
yichuan wrote: post #53

I think there’s huge potential for a fully local “Cursor-like” stack — no cloud, no API keys, just everything running on your machine. The setup could be: • Cursor CLI for agentic/dev stuff (example: https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1953559384531050724 ) • A local memory layer compatible with the CLI — something like LEANN (97% smaller index, zero cloud cost, full privacy, https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN ) or Milvus…

[flagged]

You should probably disclose everywhere you comment that you're advertising for Leann.

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

#127

Post by greggsy »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #82
can16358p wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many folks, especially if they are into getting things free, don't really care much about privacy narrative. So yes, it is free.

This is not only a privacy concern (in fact, that might be a tiny part since the code might end up public anyway?). There is an element of disclosure of personal data, there are ownership issues in case that code was not - in fact - going to be public and more. In any case, not caring about the cost (at a specific time) doesn't make the cost disappear.

The point they are making is, that some people know that, and are not as concerned as others about it.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

indigodaddy wrote: post #38
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…

Very cool, a lot to chew on here. Thanks so much for the feedback!

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by tummler »

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…

Anecdotal, but Grok seems to have just introduced pretty restrictive rate limits. They’re now giving free users access to Grok 4 with a low limit and then making it difficult to manually switch to Grok 3 and continue. Will only allow a few more requests before pushing an upgrade to paid plans. Just started happening to me last night.

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

#130

Post by brokegrammer »

These tricks are a little too much for me. I'd rather just write the code myself instead of opening 20 tabs with different LLM chats each.

However, I'd like to mention a tool called repomix (https://repomix.com/), which will pack your code into a single file that can be fed to an LLM's web chat. I typically feed it to Qwen3 Coder or AI Studio with good results.

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