Comment by gib444
6 days ago
Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget?
Is the only choice to pay for the "max" plans?
Or just read so much about it that you bs your way through an interview and then use the company's resources?
Simon, I'm curious too how much you invest each month researching all the latest and great AI tech?
Opencode has free access to Qwen 3.6 and Deepseek v4 Flash right now.
They're on par with Claude and Codex imo - when you still design architecture and know what the output should be. Claude and GPT 5.5 need less guidance with vibe coding, but we're not yet at a point where that's sustainable anyway even with those models.
Thanks, playing with Opencode now. It just wrote a half-decent Android small app. Pretty good so far!
>Starting from zero today, how would someone quickly get upto speed with the latest and greatest AI tooling on an extremely limited budget?
Z.AI, Moonshot.AI, Xiaomi, Minimax, Alibaba all have coding plans that allows a massive usage of GLM 5.1, Kimi k2.6, Minimax M2.7, Qwen 3.6 Plus, Xiaomi MiMo v2.5 Pro for cheap.
Pair those coding plans with the harness of choice including Claude Code and you are good to go.
Also, Nvidia is offering free access to top models for free through NIM - but you have 40 RPM limits. https://blog.kilo.ai/p/nvidia-nim-kilo-code-free-kimi-k25
I made an account on OpenRouter.ai , created an API key, plugged the API key into the Zed editor, and started asking free models questions about my codebase.
Once I felt I had some confidence on what the spend rate would be, I bought $20 USD worth of credits and would occasionally point my editor at a cheap paid model for some real-time questions.
I've still only spent less than $2 in credits so far, as often a free model can answer my question fast enough.
I have not yet tried agentic coding, but at least with OpenRouter API keys it's trivial to cost-cap keys so you can pay for lower latency and still cap your spending.
$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat
Ah I'd read so much about the downgrading of that plan I didn't think that was still true?
It depends on what you’re comparing it against. For $20, OpenAI is still probably the best value for SOTA models. In terms of limits, you can use GPT-5.4 instead of 5.5. The intelligence feels similar, but it’s cheaper. You can also experiment with other harnesses like pi. It’s lightweight but capable enough, and its token usage is definitely much more efficient.
Opencode go + pi.dev is 10$ a month.