Sidenote: On the second page, the 2nd and 4th paragraphs seem duplicated?
totally sped thru vibe adding stuff lol whoops.. some stuff got a little messed up
How I code with AI on a budget/free
241–250 of 251 posts
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#242This is nightmarish, whether or not you like LLMs. Just use Amazon Q Dev for free which will cover every single area that you need in every context that you need (IDE, CLI, etc.).
nice try, bot. I just don't like Amazon anything. I am onto their long term game.
They will give you free stuff, wait til its burned into your mind, then slowly raise the price or add annoying marketing trickery bs. Or lawyer-designed bs to trap you. I just don't want to live in that world.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#243OP must be a master of context switching! I can’t imagine opening that number of tabs and still focus
Honestly there just isn't any alternative - the quality I get from this method is just better.. and often times, less than that level of quality just sucks too much and in the long run takes up more time.
But I am trying some of the new CLI agent tools lately and some of them seem pretty good so far... It will take me time to really compare it though.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
yeah i tried fixing it - the websites were more of an afterthought or annoying thing i had to do and definitely did it way too fast
You mean none of your 20 browser tabs of free AIs could manage to make a website responsive?
this website is an after thought, i did NOT spend much time on it, like, at all. Its more like "ugh, i guess i should share what I know" and try to do it too fast so I can get back to the thing I want to do/having fun with
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#245I jump between Claude Sonnet 4 on GitHub Copilot Pro and now GPT-5 on ChatGPT. That seems to get me pretty far. I have gpt-oss:20b installed with ollama, but haven't found a need to use it yet, and it seems like it just takes too long on an M1 Max MacBook Pro 64GB. Claude Sonnet 4 is pretty exceptional. GPT-4.1 asks me too frequently if it wants to move forward. Yes! Of course! Just do it! I'll reject your changes or…
What are you using GPT 4.1 with, anything? I find that it will follow your instructions REALLY well, so maybe whatever you are using it in, there is a problem with the prompt. Something might be telling it to do that. It really does do whatever you tell it (but you might not be able to see the full prompt if you are using GPT 4.1 with some kind of other tool/not raw).
Using it in Cline (free VS Code extension) it does exactly what it is told to do, I will have a bigger/smarter model figure out plans for it. It will edit files and just do stuff but its not really the model to think or plan etc.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#246Ha, I'm working on a similar tool: https://github.com/DrSiemer/codemerger Glad to see I'm not the only one who prefers to work like that. I don't need many different models though, the free version of Gemini 2.5 Pro is usually enough for me. Especially the 1.000.000 token context length is really useful. I can just keep dumping full code merges in. I'll have a look at the alternatives mentioned though. Some questions…
There has got to be probably 100 of these tools by now, yours is the only other one that has a UI that I have found.
Lot of people all get the same idea eventually.. we all run into the same problems eventually
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#247Why 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
I have used it, but I just haven't found it good when I have, maybe its gotten better.
I have it as one of the free models in a chrome extension I was working on since I keep a list of tons of free APIs, just there are so many options and I tend to just use the top 5-10 best ones (that I have noticed as being great)
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#248My 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…
You should try GLM 4.5; it's better in practice than Kimi K2 and Qwen3 Coder, but it's not getting much hype.
I think it is my favorite model out of all of them. Its the one I tend to go to for just about everything now. I just found something called Octofriend that is supposedly really good set to GLM 4.5.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#249These 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.
I feel the same way, so this post inspired me to think about "how to improve intelligence."
If I encounter a problem that's difficult to solve (and more automated tools like Claude Code can't solve it), I might try to package the source code context and send it separately to the LLM chat window.
This approach can reduce the length of the context.
Re: How I code with AI on a budget/free
#250Maybe 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.
I think this is exactly why microservices will rise sharply. As AI-assisted coding grows, the natural push will be toward smaller, well-bounded contexts where both humans and AI can operate more effectively.