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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

#191

Post by debian3 »

VagabundoP wrote: post #168
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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?

GH Copilot is my guess. Not free, but $10 a month or free for students

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

#192

Post by radio879 »

VagabundoP wrote: post #168
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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?

look up LLM7, and Pollinations AI. Both offer free GPT 4.1, but I am not sure how limited it is. They have tons more models but the names are different (openai-large = gpt-4.1)

Meta has free and generous APIs for the crappy Llama 4 models... they're okay at summarizing things but I have no idea if its any good for code. Prob not since no one even talks about those anymore.

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

#193

Post by ashirviskas »

burgerone wrote: post #112

Why are people still drawn to using pointless AI assistants for everything? What time do we save by making the code quality worse overall?

The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that this formula was "delivery > quality". It's also why almost no one writes assembly for production. Or C, and we get tons of bloated electron apps.

(If it was not clear, I have no love for JS and I never really programmed in it, but you have to admit, it did allow us to have more stuff. Even if 99% of it should be torched by fire if evaluated purely from engineering perspective)

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

#194

Post by bongodongobob »

mattmanser wrote: post #190
bongodongobob wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really very good at that. Frequently, I'll have something I've been working on over the years that has turned into an interconnected mess. "Split this code into modules of separated concerns". Bam, done. I used Claude for the first time last week and gave it a 2k line PowerShell script and it neatly pulled it apart into 5 working modules on the first try. Worked exactly the same, and ended up with better comment…

So I've done that sort of refactoring a lot, albeit on real code in much bigger systems, not a script. Lots of coders won't do this, they'll just keep adding to the crap, crazy big module. I always end up with a vastly smaller code base. Like 2000 lines turns into 800 lines or something like that. Did that happen too or did the AI just do a glorified 'extract method', that any decent IDE can already do without AI? I…

It ended up being less, yeah, but not by that much, maybe 15%. Thing is, there was no "extract methods" possible. It was an old user script creation tool that had been modified over the last 10 years. If it were that easy, I would have just done it myself.

What this shows me is that it truly understands all the things this script was supposed to do and was able to organize it better, while not breaking any functionality.

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

#195

Post by freeopinion »

bahmboo wrote: post #72
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".

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.

There is a company that is advertising like crazy for programmers, data scientists, etc. They are looking for college kids, etc. They are paying better than McDonalds.

What are they building? A training corpus.

Are people who responds to their ads getting the money for free?

Handing your codebase to an AI company is not nothing.

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

#196

Post by freeopinion »

frankzander wrote: post #73
bahmboo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hm why pay for something when I can get it for free? Being miserly is a skill that can save a lot of money.

I built a simple little CRUD app for somebody the other day. They were very appreciative of the free app. So they bought me a pizza.

I got a free pizza just for coding a little app. That saved me a lot of money.

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

#197

Post by xwolfi »

ashirviskas wrote: post #193
burgerone wrote: post #112

Why are people still drawn to using pointless AI assistants for everything? What time do we save by making the code quality worse overall?

The answers would be similar to the question "why is Javascript so popular". It was not fast to run, not safe, not optimized and poor in most areas except for being almost universal and having results faster either due to js developers availability, or due to it being a high level language, even if it did try to multiply a "dog" string by 2 sometimes in some spaghetti codebase. It got better, but even before that thi…

JS is cool because the browser interprets it to show nice effects on website. AI agents are pointless

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

#198

Post by tunesmith »

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…

For those who don't know, OpenAI Codex CLI will now work with your ChatGPT plus or pro account. They barely announced it but it's on their github page. You don't have to use an api key.

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

#199

Post by knowaveragejoe »

dist-epoch wrote: post #103
radio879 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the article. I'm also doing a similar thing, here are my tips: - https://chutes.ai - 200 requests per day if you deposit (one-time) $5 for top open weights models - GLM, Qwen, ... - https://github.com/marketplace/models/ - around 10 requests per day to o3, ... if you have the $10 GitHub Copilot subsciption - https://ferdium.org - I open all the LLM webapps here as separate "apps", my one place to go to tal…

With chutes.ai, where do you see a one-time $5 for 200 requests/day?

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

#200

Post by frumplestlatz »

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…

It was a bit difficult to trust the source after seeing the phrase "Nazi-adjacent" used in relation to Grok.
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