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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

#71

Post by b2m9 »

hgarg wrote: post #51
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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…

Qwen is totally useless any serious dev work.

It’s really hit and miss for me. Well defined small tasks seem ok. But every time I try some “agentic coding”, it burns through millions of tokens without producing anything working.

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

#72

Post by bahmboo »

teiferer wrote: post #65
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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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…

> 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.

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

#73

Post by frankzander »

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.

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

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

#74

Post by ya3r »

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…

Have you seen Microsoft's copilot? It is essentially free openai models

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

#75

Post by b2m9 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #45
joshdavham wrote: post #40

> When you use AI in web chat's (the chat interfaces like AI Studio, ChatGPT, Openrouter, instead of thru an IDE or agent framework) are almost always better at solving problems, and coming up with solutions compared to the agents like Cline, Trae, Copilot.. Not always, but usually. I completely agree with this! While I understand that it looks a little awkward to copy and paste your code out of your IDE and into a w…

100% opposite experience. Whether agentic, not… it’s all about context. Either agentic with access to your whole project, “lives” in GitHub, a fine tune, or RAG, or whatever… having access to all of the context drastically reduces hallucinations. There is a big difference between “write x” and “write x for me in my style, with all y dependencies, and considering all z code that exists around it”. I’m honestly not und…

I’m also surprised by this take. I found copy/paste between editor and external chats to be way less helpful.

That being said, I think everyone has probably different expectations and workflows. So if that’s what works for them, who am I to judge?

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

#79

Post by bambax »

As the post says, the problem with coding agents is they send a lot of their own data + almost your entire code base for each request: that's what makes them expensive. But when used in a chat the costs are so low as to be insignificant.

I only use OpenRouter which gives access to almost all models.

Sonnet was my favorite until I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is almost always better. It can be quite slow though. So for basic questions / syntax reminders I just use Gemini Flash: super fast, and good for simple tasks.

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

#80

Post by hx8 »

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 live a pretty frugal life, and reached the FI part of FIRE in my early 30s as an averagely compensated software engineer.

I am very skeptical anytime something is 'free'. I specifically avoid using a free service when the company profits from my use of the service. These arrangements usually start mutually beneficial, and almost always become user hostile.

Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Because the exchange of money for service sets clear boundaries and expectations.

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