Ask HN: What's the best free AI coding assistant available?

3 supermanonipad 7 8/17/2025, 7:15:02 PM

I’m not a programmer, but I understand how code works conceptually. I rely on AI coding assistants to help me build projects, but I’ve run into a common problem: most good ones are paid or have very limited free tiers.

For example, I used Augment Code (1,000 free daily requests) and Kiro IDE (200 free daily requests), but both eventually moved behind paywalls.

I’m hoping to find recommendations for new or still-free AI coding assistants that I can use without hitting strict limits.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Comments (7)

supermanonipad · 3h ago

I forgot to add, it has to be a cloud provider I can't run anything locally I have very limited PC resources. Thank you again.

bigyabai · 2h ago

There are no (good) free coding assistants that provide truly unlimited usage. If you don't own or pay for some sort of metered hardware, then you'll have to pay sooner or later.

supermanonipad · 2h ago

I understand this that is why I was able to specify The technology I'm looking for is something usually in bata stage whereby the developers of that specific technology still grants to a degree "free access"

roscas · 3h ago

Ollama + qwen3-coder:30b

supermanonipad · 3h ago

Unfortunately I can't run anything locally, limited resources. Thank you for the suggestion

incomingpain · 3h ago

https://openrouter.ai/rankings#apps

Pretty good way to gauge the best ai tools.

No surprise seeing kilo, roo, and cline at the top.

opencode, aider, crush, qwen code, and openhands are some other top options.

supermanonipad · 3h ago

Thank you very much, but the problem still remains Open router doesn't even allow me to freely access Apis for some reason when I tried setting it up to kilo code it just didn't work.

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