gptel is great, its one of the must have packages for Emacs and I'm pretty sure that with time it will be one of the reasons to use Emacs like org-mode has been for a long time.

For people wanting to get up and running with vanilla Emacs (instead of a distribution) so that they can try out gptel sometime this week, I recommend emacs-bedrock: https://codeberg.org/ashton314/emacs-bedrock

And for a gptel backend Gemini is the fastest route (excluding something local) from generating an API key to using a LLM in Emacs (for free).

Bonus points because Emacs is useful for things other than coding you can use gptel on your notes or any buffer really to ask/talk about stuff.