It’s not free FREE but if you deposit at least $10 on OpenRouter, you can use their free models without credit withdrawals. And those models are quite powerful, like DeepSeek R1. Sometimes, they are rate limited by the provider due to their popularity but it works in a pinch.
How I code with AI on a budget/free
141–150 of 251 posts
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#142Nice write-up, especially the point about mixing different models for different stages of coding.
I’ve been tracking which IDE/CLI tools give free or semi-free access to pro-grade LLMs (e.g., GPT-5, Claude code, Gemini 2.5 Pro) and how generous their quotas are. Ended up putting them side-by-side so it’s easier to compare hours, limits, and gotchas: https://github.com/inmve/free-ai-coding
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just use lmstudio.ai, it's what everyone is using nowadays
LM Studio is awesome
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
Many folks, especially if they are into getting things free, don't really care much about privacy narrative. So yes, it is free.
Tech companies are making untold fortunes from unsophisticated people like you.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#145Ai studio using https://aistudio.google.com/ is unlimited.
I also use kiro which I got access for completely free because I was early on seeing kiro and actually trying it out because of hackernews!
Sometimes I use cerebras web ui to get insanely fast token generation of things like gpt-oss or qwen 480 b or qwen in general too.
I want to thank hackernews for kiro! I mean, I am really grateful to this platform y'know. Not just for free stuff but in general too. Thanks :>
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#146I 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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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?
some days.. it varies but a whole browser window is dedicated to it and always open
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#147Earlier 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.
> So yes, it is free. This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value. If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences. If an idiot is convinc…
I should add a section to the site/guide about privacy, just letting people know they have somewhat of a choice with that.
As for sharing code, most of the parts of a project/app/whatever have already been done and if an experienced developer hears what your idea is, they could just make it and figure it out without any code. The code itself doesn't really seem that valuable (well.. sometimes). Someone can just look at a screenshot of my aicodeprep app and just make one and make it look the same too.
Not all the time of course - If I had some really unique sophisticated algorithms that I knew almost no one else would or has figured out, I would be more careful.
Speaking of privacy.. a while back a thought popped into my head about Slack, and all these unencrypted chat's businesses use. It kinda does seem crazy to do all your business operations over unencrypted chat, Slack rooms.. I personally would not trust Zuckerberg to not look in there and run lots of LLMs through all the conversations to find anything 'good'! Microsoft.. kinda doubt would do that on purpose but what's to stop a rogue employee from finding out some trade secrets etc.. I'd be suprised if it hasn't been done. Security is not usually a priority in tech. They half-ass care about your personal info.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#148I 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.
thx - i did not know that. Will try to fix.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#149It’s not free FREE but if you deposit at least $10 on OpenRouter, you can use their free models without credit withdrawals. And those models are quite powerful, like DeepSeek R1. Sometimes, they are rate limited by the provider due to their popularity but it works in a pinch.
Actually nowadays they allow unlimited usage of free models without depositing anything.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#150My 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 use a 500 million parameter model for editor completions because I want those to nearly instantaneous and the plugin makes 50+ completion requests every session.
Which model and which plugin, please?