The qwen coder CLI gives you 1000 free requests per day to the qwen coder model (405b). Probably the best free option right now.
Qwen cli uses whole file edit format which is slow and burns credits fast same is issue with gemini cli.
How I code with AI on a budget/free
171–180 of 251 posts
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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" t…
well, most of the time, I just dump the entire codebase in if the context window is big and its a good model. But there are plenty of times when I need to block one folder in a repo or disable a few files because the files might "nudge" it in a wrong direction. The surgical context tool (aicodeprep-gui) - there are at least 30 similar tools but most (if not all) are CLI only/no UI. I like UIs, I work faster with them…
Have you seen this?
https://github.com/robertpiosik/CodeWebChat
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#173Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#174Earlier 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 don't think that's true. It's not that has zero value, it's that it has zero monetizable value.
Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
For YC, you are producing content that is "valuable" that brings people to their site, which they monetize through people signing up for their program. They do this with no regard for what your preferences are when they choose companies to invest in.
They sell ads (Launch, Hire, etc.) against the attention that you create. You ARE the product on HackerNews, and you're OK with it. As am I.
Same as OpenAI, I dont need to monetize them training on my data, and I am happy for you to as I would like to use the services for free.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#175Looks like somebody is a tad bit over reliant on these tools but other than that there is a lot of value in this article
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#176Earlier 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.
Sophistry. "many" according to which statistic? And just because some people consider that a trade is very favorable for them, doesn't it is not a trade and it doesn't mean they are correct - who's so naïve they can beat business people at their own game?
they +think they+ can beat business people
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not being concerned doesn't make the statement "it's free" more true.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#178Earlier 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".
I was going to downvote you but you are adding to the discussion. In this context this is free from having to spend money. Many of us don't have the option to pay for models. We have to find some way to get the state of the art without spending our food money.
I appreciate your consideration, disagree != downvote.
To your point, "free from having to spend money" is exactly it. It's paid for with other things, and I get that some folks don't care. But being more open about this would be nice. You don't typically hide a monetary cost either, and everybody trying to do that is rightfully called out on it by being called a scam. Doing that with non-monetary costs would be a nice custom.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#179I 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 built a relevant tool (approved by Apple this week) which may help reduce the friction of you having to constantly copy paste text between your app and the AI assistant in browser.
It's called SelectToSearch and it reduces my friction by 85% by automating all those copy paste etc actions with a single keyboard shortcut:
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/select-to-search-ai-assistant/...
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#180To 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.
Same! I’ve been using Continue in VSCode and found most of the bigger Qwen models plus gpt-oss-120b to be great in agentic mode!
Do you use openrouter models with continue?