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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

#161

Post by mathiaspoint »

ghxst wrote: post #158
mathiaspoint wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What editor do you use, and how did you set it up? I've been thinking about trying this with some local models and also with super low-latency ones like Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite. Would love to read more about this.

Neovim with the llama.cpp plugin and heavily quantized qwen2.5-coder with 500 (600?) million parameters. It's almost plug and play although the default ring context limit is way too large if you don't have a GPU.

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

#162

Post by epolanski »

5kyn3t wrote: post #136

Why is Mistral not mentioned. Is there any reason? I have the impression that they are often ignored by media, bloggers, devs when it comes to comparing or showcasing LLM thingies. Comes with free tier and quality is quite good. (But I am not an AI power user) https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

Off topic but I use Mistral in production for various one shot tasks (mostly summarizing), it's incredibly cheap, fast and effective.

Bonus: it's European, kinda tired of giving always money to the American overlords.

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

#163

Post by epolanski »

3036e4 wrote: post #132

Maybe optimistic, but reading posts like this makes me hopeful that AI-assisted coding will drive people to design more modular and sanely organized code, to reduce the amount of context required for each task. Sadly pretty much all code I have worked with have been giant messes of everything being connected to everything else, causing the entire project to be potential context for anything.

It does, you're essentially forced to write good coding guidelines and documentation.

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

#164

Post by simonw »

alpaca128 wrote: post #157
simonw wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would encourage you to rethink this position just a little bit. Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live. If it helps, think about those company's own selfish motivations. They like money, so they like paying customers. If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data any…

> they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too No, they won't. And that's the problem in your argument. Google landed in court for tracking users in incognito mode. They also were fined for not complying with the rules for cookie popups. Facebook lost in court for illegally using data for advertising. Did it lose them any paying customer? Maybe, but not nearly enough for them to even notic…

Landing in court is an expensive thing that companies don't want to happen.

Your examples also differ from what I'm talking about. Advertising supported business models have a different relationship with end users.

People getting something for free are less likely to switch providers over a privacy concern compared with companies is paying thousands of dollars a month (or more) for a paid service under the understanding that it won't train on their data.

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

#165

Post by throwaway83711 »

can16358p wrote: post #81
teiferer wrote: post #65

Earlier 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.

It's a transaction—a trade. You give them your personal data, and you get their services in exchange.

So no, it's not free.

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

#166

Post by throwaway83711 »

barrell wrote: post #106
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.

Plenty of people can also afford to subscribe to these without any issue. They don’t even know the price, they probably won’t even cancel it when they stop using it as they might not even realize they have a subscription. By your logic, are the paid plans not sometimes free?

While it is true that sometimes you are the product even if you're paying, I don't think anyone is trying to argue that obviously paid plans are free.

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

#167

Post by bayarearefugee »

1dom wrote: post #114
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.

> 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 understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.

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

#168

Post by VagabundoP »

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…

I tried Cline with chatgpt 4.1 and I was charged - there are some free credits when you sign up for Cline that it used.

Not sure how you got it for free?

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

#170

Post by sunaookami »

5kyn3t wrote: post #136

Why is Mistral not mentioned. Is there any reason? I have the impression that they are often ignored by media, bloggers, devs when it comes to comparing or showcasing LLM thingies. Comes with free tier and quality is quite good. (But I am not an AI power user) https://chat.mistral.ai/chat

Becase Mistral is very bad, Qwen, Kimi and GLM are just better.
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