Best setups right now are: Agents: Aider or Cline Then pair either one of those with : Autocomplete: continue.dev(with codestral) or Supermaven. Good free apis right now: Xai is giving $25 per month free api credits Google AI studio has Gemini pro and flash at pretty fair free API rates. Good dirt cheap api: Deepseek Qwen 2.5 Anything free on Openrouter. Edit: forgot to say because I figured most would know but: you’re doing all of this in VSCode. More on reddit.com

You trying to learn python, or already know python and want a ai companion? If you're learning, I wouldn't use any of em. More on reddit.com

More than 300 lines isn’t ‘helping’ IMHO, it’s more like letting the AI do all the work. What specific help is it? I use only a ‘helper’ AI in my IDE which can basically read my mind almost and do the annoying repetitive stuff, based on what I already made for context. I never let it make stuff from scratch. More on reddit.com

Why use just one? open tabs for every AI out there. Make one the main employee and assign the others roles based on their strengths. If one has errors, use the others to solve them. You can even have them communicate and coordinate simply by prompting your main LLM to do so. For example: Leader: (Use Gemini 2.0 Flash; its context length is the longest, and its skills are flagship-level.) Use this AI to plan and act on your ideas. Code Generator: (Your choice—the best would be Claude, with sequential thinking, MCP server, and codebase access, but using it for free is impossible. A good alternative might be another Gemini model, perhaps even the AI Studio experimental model; it's a free reasoning model and very powerful.) Code Assistant: (Deepseek or Qwen 2.5 Max) Prompt Engineer: (Assign this role to another GPT model. Create a custom model or project with system instructions to enhance your prompts and act as a prompt engineer.) I'd like to emphasize how system instructions and active prompt engineering will greatly benefit you in this situation. Employ a workflow where you take your ideas, errors, or anything you need solutions for, and create a document that asks questions, provides examples, and explains the context for which you want answers. Then, query every AI model you know of (12 different flagship models) and ask the questions. Finally, fuse the insights from every AI into your next moves. Don't think of AI as one tool and one solution. It enables you to find multiple solutions. It's not about what AI is "best" or which one "thinks the hardest"; look at it through a lens of collaboration. Each model has its own personality and unique abilities. Limiting collaboration limits growth. We are in an era where our computers are, in most senses of the word, "alive." They can work for 30 minutes or more without your input. So, what's stopping you from adding more "employees" and getting more done with AI? Even for free, these things can be done to some extent. The only limit is the human in the loop. More on reddit.com