How I code with AI on a budget/free
31 comments
·August 9, 2025andai
statenjason
Aider as a non-agentic coding tool strikes a nice balance on the efficiency vs effectiveness front. Using tree-sitter to create a repo map of the repository means less filesystem digging. No MCP, but shell commands mean it can use utilities I myself am familiar with. Combined with Cerebras as a provider, the turnaround on prompts is instant; I can stay involved rather than waiting on multiple rounds of tool calls. It's my go-to for smaller scale projects.
reactordev
To 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.
AstroBen
I've found Zed to be a step up from continue.dev - you can use your own models there also
navbaker
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!
chromaton
If you're looking for free API access, Google offers access to Gemini for free, including for gemini-2.5-pro with thinking turned on. The limit is... quite high, as I'm running some benchmarking and haven't hit the limit yet.
Open weight models like DeepSeek R1 and GPT-OSS are also made available with free API access from various inference providers and hardware manufacturers.
gooosle
Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day.
tomrod
Doesn't it swap to a lower power model after that?
chiwilliams
I'm assuming it isn't sensitive for your purposes, but note that Google will train on these interactions, but not if you pay.
cammikebrown
I wonder how much energy this is wasting.
robotsquidward
Right - free to you maybe.
bravesoul2
Untradable carbon tax (or carbon price for people who hate the T word) is needed.
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swader999
Noped right out of that fast as soon as I saw the font.
sestep
You probably only saw the cursive backup font and not the intended Roboto font that the page actually uses (which took about half a second to load for me); here's a snippet from the CSS:
font-family: "Roboto", "Underdog", cursive, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont,
"Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji",
"Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";Havoc
For anyone else confused - there is a page 2 and 3 in the post that you need to access via arrow thing at bottom.
radio879
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/aicp ) which is linked to from there which helps jump back and forth from all the different AI chat tabs i have open (which is almost always totally free, and I get the best output from those) to my IDE. The app tries to remove all friction, and annoyances, when you are working with the native web chat interfaces for all the AIs. Its free and has been getting great feedback, criticism welcome.
It helps the going from IDE <----> web chat tabs. Made it for myself to save time and I prefer the UI (PySide6 UI so much lighter than a webview)
Its got Preset buttons to add text that you find yourself typing very often, per-project state saves of window size of app and which files were used for context. So next time, it opens at same state.
Auto scans for code files, guesses likely ones needed, prompt box that can put the text above and below the code context (seems to help make the output better). One of my buttons is set to: "Write a prompt for Cline, the AI coding agent, enclose the whole prompt in a single code tag for easy copy and pasting. Break the tasks into some smaller tasks with enough detail and explanations to guide Cline. Use search and replace blocks with plain language to help it find where to edit"
What i do for problem solving, figuring out bugs: I'm usually in VS Code and i type aicp in terminal to open the app. Fine tune any files already checked, type what i am trying to do or what problem i have to fix, click Cline button, click Generate Context!. Paste into GLM-4.5, sometimes o3 or o4-mini, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro.. if its a super hard thing i'll try 2 or 3 models. I'll look and see which one makes the most sense and just copy and paste into Cline in VS Code - set to GPT 4.1 which is unlimited/free.. 4.1 isn't super crazy smart or anything but it follows orders... it will do whatever you ask, reliably. AND, it will correct minor mistakes from the bigger model's output. The bigger smarter models can figure out the details, and they'll write a prompt that is a task list with how-to's and why's perfect for 4.1 to go and do in agent mode....
You can code for free this way unlimited, and its the smartest the models will be. Anytime you throw some tools or MCPs at a model it dumbs them down.... AND you waste money on all the API costs having to use Claude 4 for everything
indigodaddy
Is glm-4.5 air useable? I see it's free on Openrouter. Also pls advise what you think is the current best free openrouter model for coding. Thanks!
bravesoul2
Windsurf has a good free model. Good enough for autocomplete level work for sure (haven't tried it for more as I use Claude Code)
indigodaddy
Assuming you have to at least be logged into a windsurf account though?
bravesoul2
Yeah. I didn't see not logged in as a requirement.
CjHuber
Without tricks google aistudio definitely has limits, though pretty high ones. gemini.google.com on the other hand has less than a handful of free 2.5 pro messages for free
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GaggiX
OpenAI offering 2.5M free tokens daily small models and 250k for big ones (tier 1-2) is so useful for random projects, I use them to learn japanese for example (by having a program that list informations about what the characters are just saying: vocabulary, grammar points, nuances).
porlemni
“How I do free data entry for every corpo fascist tech oligarchs’ plagiarism and manufactured consent machines simultaneously.”
bravesoul2
You could get them all to idly chat to each other.
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 agentic, you can go surgical. At that point even 100x smaller models can handle it. Just tell it what to do and let it give you the diff.
Also I found the "fumble around my filesystem" approach stupid for my scale, where I can mostly fit the whole codebase into the context. So I just dump src/ into the prompt. (Other people's projects are a lot more boilerplatey so I'm testing ultra cheap models like gpt-oss-20b for code search. For that, I think you can go even cheaper...)
Patent pending.