Chat GPT Gemini code assist. Gemini Claude. Cline Roocode ChatGPT again Codex All of these are amazing for coding More on reddit.com

What you mean by "Truly free"? At the end of the day, these are businesses: sure, they let you try their services, but they are not charitable organisations. In time, you too want to charge to use your app, so, think of the app that gives you the best results for your use case, not the "truly free". Spoiler: there's none. More on reddit.com

This is a benchmark of the best model + tool combinations: https://gosuevals.com/agents.html The author updated results in December but hasn't posted them, yet. Look at his YT channel for the video. This article explains how to maintain context over time with Claude Code, but it applies to most AI tools: https://substack.com/inbox/post/176875410 More on reddit.com

There are going to be a lot of opinions here, likely all are correct and this is just one opinion. Claude Sonnet 3.5 is the best LLM coding model out right now. How you use it, is up to you. CoPilot, Cursor, Cline or Roo are all active projects that integrate very well with it. For $20, you can pay for Cursor and you will immediately see the value but once you tap out your premium credits it starts to trail off on quality. Roo or Cline (VS Plugins) are both fantastic, each does things slightly different but you will use OpenRouter.ai and pay per use... which also can get expensive. The bigger your project becomes, the more you will consume. That's just the state of AI coding. It will get caught in loops, so focusing on the right prompts will help considerable. Roo/CLine/Cursor all have chat systems which can help you create better prompts. Using working memory by having the model update a readme with tasks, seems to help some. It's not perfect but when it works, especially in the beginning, it is pretty magical. Good luck! More on reddit.com