I am the person that wrote that. Sorry about the font. This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed. More models so I will try to update that.
Every month so many new models come out. My new fav is GLM-4.5... Kimi K2 is also good, and Qwen3-Coder 480b, or 2507 instruct.. very good as well. All of those work really well in any agentic environment/in agent tools.
I made a context helper app ( https://wuu73.org/aicp ) which is linked to from there which helps jump back and forth from all the different AI chat tabs i have open (which is almost always totally free, and I get the best output from those) to my IDE. The app tries to remove all friction, and annoyances, when you are working with the native web chat interfaces for all the AIs. Its free and has been getting great feedback, criticism welcome.
It helps the going from IDE <----> web chat tabs. Made it for myself to save time and I prefer the UI (PySide6 UI so much lighter than a webview)
Its got Preset buttons to add text that you find yourself typing very often, per-project state saves of window size of app and which files were used for context. So next time, it opens at same state.
Auto scans for code files, guesses likely ones needed, prompt box that can put the text above and below the code context (seems to help make the output better). One of my buttons is set to: "Write a prompt for Cline, the AI coding agent, enclose the whole prompt in a single code tag for easy copy and pasting. Break the tasks into some smaller tasks with enough detail and explanations to guide Cline. Use search and replace blocks with plain language to help it find where to edit"
What i do for problem solving, figuring out bugs: I'm usually in VS Code and i type aicp in terminal to open the app. Fine tune any files already checked, type what i am trying to do or what problem i have to fix, click Cline button, click Generate Context!. Paste into GLM-4.5, sometimes o3 or o4-mini, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro.. if its a super hard thing i'll try 2 or 3 models. I'll look and see which one makes the most sense and just copy and paste into Cline in VS Code - set to GPT 4.1 which is unlimited/free.. 4.1 isn't super crazy smart or anything but it follows orders... it will do whatever you ask, reliably. AND, it will correct minor mistakes from the bigger model's output. The bigger smarter models can figure out the details, and they'll write a prompt that is a task list with how-to's and why's perfect for 4.1 to go and do in agent mode....
You can code for free this way unlimited, and its the smartest the models will be. Anytime you throw some tools or MCPs at a model it dumbs them down.... AND you waste money on all the API costs having to use Claude 4 for everything
(relevant self promotion) i wrote a cli tool called slupe that lets web based llm dictate fs changes to your computer to make it easier to do ai coding from web llms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776250
> You can code for free this way
vs
> If you set your account's data settings to allow OpenAI to use your data for model training
So, it's not "for free".
I was going to downvote you but you are adding to the discussion. In this context this is free from having to spend money. Many of us don't have the option to pay for models. We have to find some way to get the state of the art without spending our food money.
I don't trust any AI company not to use and monetise my data, regardless how much I pay or regardless what their terms of service say. I know full well that large companies ignore laws with impunity and no accountability.
I would encourage you to rethink this position just a little bit. Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live.
If it helps, think about those company's own selfish motivations. They like money, so they like paying customers. If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.
Which hurts their bottom line. It's in their interest not to break those promises.
> they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too
No, they won't. And that's the problem in your argument. Google landed in court for tracking users in incognito mode. They also were fined for not complying with the rules for cookie popups. Facebook lost in court for illegally using data for advertising. Did it lose them any paying customer? Maybe, but not nearly enough for them to even notice a difference. The larger outcome was that people are now more pissed at the EU for cookie popups that make the greed for data more transparent. Also in the case of Google most money comes from different people than the ones that have their privacy violated, so the incentives are not working as you suggest.
> Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live
Ignoring existing problems isn't a recipe for a happy life either.
Landing in court is an expensive thing that companies don't want to happen.
Your examples also differ from what I'm talking about. Advertising supported business models have a different relationship with end users.
People getting something for free are less likely to switch providers over a privacy concern compared with companies is paying thousands of dollars a month (or more) for a paid service under the understanding that it won't train on their data.
>Landing in court is an expensive thing that companies don't want to happen.
"If the penalty is a fine, it's legal for the rich". These businesses also don't want to pay taxes or even workers, but in the end they will take the path of least resistence. if they determine fighting in court for 10 years is more profitable than following regulations, then they'll do it.
Until we start jailing CEO's (a priceless action), this will continue.
>companies is paying thousands of dollars a month (or more) for a paid service under the understanding that it won't train on their data.
Sure, but are we talking about people or companies here?
CEO says the action was against policy and they didn't know, so the blame passes down until you get to a scapegoat that can't defend themselves.
The underlying problem is that we have companies with more power than sovereign states, before you even include the power over the state the companies have.
At some point in the next few decades of continued transfer of wealth from workers to owners more and more workers will snap and bypass the courts. The is what happened with the original fall of feudalism and warlords. This wasn't guaranteed though -- if the company owners keep themselves and their allies rich enough they will be untouchable, same as drug lords.
> Until we start jailing CEO's (a priceless action)
In the context of the original thread here: If all you need to do is go to jail then whatever that's for was "for free"!
I can't agree with a 'companies won't be evil because they will lose business if people don't like their evilness!' argument.
Certainly, going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live. Going through life not trusting in general, isn't a fun way to live.
Would you like to see my inbox?
We as tech people made this reality through believing in an invisible hand of morality that would be stronger than power, stronger than the profit motives available through intentionally harming strangers a little bit (or a lot) at scale, over the internet, often in an automated way, if there was a chance we'd benefit from it.
We're going to have to be the people thinking of what we collectively do in this world we've invented and are continuing to invent, because the societal arbitrage vectors aren't getting less numerous. Hell, we're inventing machines to proliferate them, at scale.
I strongly encourage you to abandon this idea that the world we've created, is optimal, and this idea that companies of all things will behave ethically because they perceive they'll lose business if they are evil.
I think they are fully correct in perceiving the exact opposite and it's on us to change conditions underneath them.
My argument here is not that companies will lose customers if they are unethical.
My argument is that they will lose paying customers if they act against those customer's interests in a way that directly violates a promise they made when convincing their customers to sign up to pay them money.
"Don't train on my data" isn't some obscure concern. If you talk to large companies about AI it comes up in almost every conversation.
My argument here is that companies are cold hearted entities that act in their self interest.
Honestly, I swear the hardest problem in computer science in 2025 is convincing people that you won't train on your data when you say "we won't train on your data".
I wrote about this back in 2023, and nothing has changed: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Dec/14/ai-trust-crisis/
I think you're making good points, that aren't exactly counter-examples to the concerns being raised.
You are making the - correct! - point that _other companies_ who have paid contracts with an AI provider would impose significant costs on that provider if those contracts were found to be breached. Either the company would leave and stop paying their huge subscription, and/or the reputational fallout would be a cost.
But companies aren't people, and are treated differently from people. Companies have lawyers. Companies have the deep pockets to fight legal cases. Companies have publicity reach. If a company is mistreated, it has the resources and capabilities to fight back. A person does not. If J. Random Hacker somehow discovers that their data is being used for training (if they even could), what are they gonna do about it - stop paying $20/month, and post on HN? That's negligible.
So - yes, you're right that there are cold-hearted profit-motivated self-interested incentives for an AI provider to not breach contract to train on _a company's_ data. But there is no such incentive protecting people.
EDIT: /u/johnnyanmac said it better than me:
>> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.
> I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.
Yes, my argument is mainly with respect to paying customers who are companies, not individuals.
I have trouble imagining why a company like Anthropic would go through the additional complexity of cheating their individual customers while not doing that to their corporate customers. That feels like a whole lot of extra work compared to just behaving properly.
Especially given that companies consist of individuals, so the last thing you want to do is breach the privacy of a personal account belonging to the person who makes purchasing decisions at a large company!
I mean this earnestly, not snidely - I wish I still had the faith that you do in not being treated abominably by any and every company, or to believe that they wouldn't default to behaving improprerly at any opportunity and for the barest profit margin. It would be nice to still believe that good things could happen under capitalism.
(as a sidenote, I'm very grateful for your insightful and balanced writing on AI in general. It played a considerable part in convincing me to give AI tooling another go after I'd initially written it off as more trouble than it was worth)
>Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live.
Isn't that the Hacker mindset, though? We want to trailblaze solutions and share it with everyone for free. Always in liberty and oftentimes in beer too. I think it's a good mentality to have, precisely because of your lens of selfish motivations.
Wanting money is fine. If it was some flat $200 or even $2000 with legally binding promises that I have an indefinitely license to use this version of the software and they won't extract anything else from me: then fine. Hackers can be cheap, but we aren't opposed to barter.
But that's not the case. Wanting all my time and privacy and data under the veneer of something hackers would provide with no or very few strings is not. tricks to push into that model is all the worse.
> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.
I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.
Sadly, this is not a land of hackers. It is a market of passive people of various walks of life: of students who do not understand what is going on under the hood (I was here when Facebook was taking off), of businsessmen too busy with other stuff to understand the sausage in the factory, of ordinary people who just wants to fire and forget. This market may never even be aware of what occurred here.
This is so naive
>We have to find some way to get the state of the art without spending our food money.
If it's not your job: Do we "have to" find this way? What's the oppotunity cost compared to a premium subscription or using not-state of the art tools?
If it is your job: it's putting food on the table. So it should be a relatively microscopic cost to doing business. Maybe even a tax write-off.
There is a company that is advertising like crazy for programmers, data scientists, etc. They are looking for college kids, etc. They are paying better than McDonalds.
What are they building? A training corpus.
Are people who responds to their ads getting the money for free?
Handing your codebase to an AI company is not nothing.
> Handing your codebase to an AI company is not nothing.
it's a battle that's already lost a long time ago. Every crappy little service by now indexes everything. If you ever touch Github, Jira, Datadog, Glean (god forbid), Upwork, etc etc they each have their own shitty little "AI" thing which means what? Your project has been indexed, bagged and tagged. So unless you code from a cave without using any saas tools, you will be indexed no matter what.
I feel like this was understood. SaaS has your data, and the pan is very hot. Two lessons that learn quickly with experience.
I appreciate your consideration, disagree != downvote.
To your point, "free from having to spend money" is exactly it. It's paid for with other things, and I get that some folks don't care. But being more open about this would be nice. You don't typically hide a monetary cost either, and everybody trying to do that is rightfully called out on it by being called a scam. Doing that with non-monetary costs would be a nice custom.
Hm why pay for something when I can get it for free? Being miserly is a skill that can save a lot of money.
I live a pretty frugal life, and reached the FI part of FIRE in my early 30s as an averagely compensated software engineer.
I am very skeptical anytime something is 'free'. I specifically avoid using a free service when the company profits from my use of the service. These arrangements usually start mutually beneficial, and almost always become user hostile.
Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Because the exchange of money for service sets clear boundaries and expectations.
Remember: if you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product.
If you're fine with compromising your privacy and having others extract wealth from you, you can go the "free" route.
You are the product no matter how much you pay tbh
I built a simple little CRUD app for somebody the other day. They were very appreciative of the free app. So they bought me a pizza.
I got a free pizza just for coding a little app. That saved me a lot of money.
Many folks, especially if they are into getting things free, don't really care much about privacy narrative.
So yes, it is free.
> So yes, it is free.
This sounds pedantic, but I think it's important to spell this out: this sort of stuff is only free if you consider what you're producing/exchanging for it to have 0 value.
If you consider what you're producing as valuable, you're giving it away to companies with an incentive to extract as much value from your thing as possible, with little regard towards your preferences.
If an idiot is convinced to trade his house for some magic beans, would you still be saying "the beans were free"?
I should add a section to the site/guide about privacy, just letting people know they have somewhat of a choice with that.
As for sharing code, most of the parts of a project/app/whatever have already been done and if an experienced developer hears what your idea is, they could just make it and figure it out without any code. The code itself doesn't really seem that valuable (well.. sometimes). Someone can just look at a screenshot of my aicodeprep app and just make one and make it look the same too.
Not all the time of course - If I had some really unique sophisticated algorithms that I knew almost no one else would or has figured out, I would be more careful.
Speaking of privacy.. a while back a thought popped into my head about Slack, and all these unencrypted chat's businesses use. It kinda does seem crazy to do all your business operations over unencrypted chat, Slack rooms.. I personally would not trust Zuckerberg to not look in there and run lots of LLMs through all the conversations to find anything 'good'! Microsoft.. kinda doubt would do that on purpose but what's to stop a rogue employee from finding out some trade secrets etc.. I'd be suprised if it hasn't been done. Security is not usually a priority in tech. They half-ass care about your personal info.
>Someone can just look at a screenshot of my aicodeprep app and just make one and make it look the same too.
To some extent. But without your codebase they will make different decisions in the back which will affect a myriad of factors. Some may actually be better than your app, others will end up adding tech debt or have performance impacts. And this isn't even to get into truly novel algorithms; sometimes just having the experience to make a scalable app with best practices can make all the difference.
Or the audience doesn't care and they take the cheaper app anyway. It's not always a happy ending.
I don't think that's true. It's not that has zero value, it's that it has zero monetizable value.
Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
For YC, you are producing content that is "valuable" that brings people to their site, which they monetize through people signing up for their program. They do this with no regard for what your preferences are when they choose companies to invest in.
They sell ads (Launch, Hire, etc.) against the attention that you create. You ARE the product on HackerNews, and you're OK with it. As am I.
Same as OpenAI, I dont need to monetize them training on my data, and I am happy for you to as I would like to use the services for free.
>Hackernews is free. The posts are valuable to me and I guess my posts are valuable to me, but I wouldn't pay for it and I definitely don't expect to get paid.
at this point, we may need future forums to be premium so we can avoid the deluge of AI bots plauging the internet. a small, one time cost is a guaranteed way to make such strategies untenable. SomethingAwful had a point decades ago.
But like any other business, you need to follow the money and understand the incentives. Hackernews has ads, but ads for companies with us as the audience. It's also indirectly an ad for YCombinator itself as bringing awareness of the accelerator (note what "hackernews.com" redirects to).
I'm fine with a company advertising itself; if I wasn't the idea of a company ceases to really function. And in this structure for companies, I can also get benefits by potentially getting jobs from here. So I don't mind that either. Everything aligns. I agree and support the structure. I can't say that about many other "free" websites.
As for me. I do want to monetize my data one day. I can't stop the scraping the entire internet over (that's for the courts), but I sure as heck won't hand it to them on a silver platter.
Definitely to each their own. I will never have a job at a YC company and I will also never apply to YC, so the ads are completely useless. I did discover some of my favorite shoes from an IG ad, though.
It wouldn't ever be worth me getting $.0001431 dollars for my data and individual data will always be worthless on it's own because 1. taking away one individuals data from a model does not make the model worse. 2. the price of an individuals data will always be zero because you have people like me who are willing to give it away for free in exchange for a free service (aka hackernews or IG)
One user's LTV on IG may be $34, but one user's data is worth $0. Which I think a lot of people struggle with.
From a more moral standpoint, the best part about the advertising business model is that it makes the internet open to everyone, not just those who can pay for every site they use.
I'm not sure if I'd ever have a job at YC (my industry isn't very "investor friendly"). But I like the idea of having a bunch of opportunities with such companies. It also encourages an environment of people I want to be around as well. So that indirectly serves my interests.
I will even use an ad example with conventions and festivals. You can argue an event like Comic-con is simply a huge ad. And it is. But I'm there "for the ad" in that case. It gathers other people "for the ad". It collectively benefits all of us to gather and socialize among one another.
Ads aren't bad, but many ads primarily exist to distract, not to facilitate an experience. And as a hot take, maybe we do need to gatekeep a bit more in this day and age. I don't want a "free intent" if it means 99% of my interactions are with bots instead of humans. If it means that corporations determine what is "worthy" of seeing instead of peers. If credit cards get to determine what I can spend my money on instead of my own personal (and legal) taste.
>It wouldn't ever be worth me getting $.0001431 dollars for my data and individual data will always be worthless on it's own
On top of being a software engineers who's contributed to millions on value with my data, I also strive to be an artist. An industry that has spent decades being extracted from but not as fortunate to be compensated a living wage most often. People can argue that "art is worthless" , yet it also props up multiple billion dollar industries on top of societal cultured. An artisan these days can even sustain themselves as a individual, with much faster turnaround than trying to program a website or app.
By all metrics, its hard to argue this sector's value is zero. Maybe having that lens only strengthened my stance, as a precursor to what software can become if you don't push against abuse early on.
I understand the point people are trying to make with this argument, but we are so far into a nearly universal scam economy where corporations see small (relative to their costs of business) fines as just part of normal expenses that I also think anyone who really believes the AI companies aren't using their data to train models, even if it is against their terms, is wildly naive.
> is wildly naive.
I do know the way of the world, I just disagree with it and would like it to be different, so I make a point of taking opportunities to try and do that. It's possible to understand the world whilst also not accepting it, and encouraging it to be better.
You can call me naive, I will call you defeatist:)
This is not only a privacy concern (in fact, that might be a tiny part since the code might end up public anyway?). There is an element of disclosure of personal data, there are ownership issues in case that code was not - in fact - going to be public and more.
In any case, not caring about the cost (at a specific time) doesn't make the cost disappear.
The point they are making is, that some people know that, and are not as concerned as others about it.
Not being concerned doesn't make the statement "it's free" more true.
I understand. I get the point. I disagree
Privacy absolutely does not matter, until it does, and then it is too late
It's a transaction—a trade. You give them your personal data, and you get their services in exchange.
So no, it's not free.
if you consider watching a hour of Youtube and 30 minutes of ads to be "free videos", then be my guest. Not everything can be measured in a dollar value.
Tech companies are making untold fortunes from unsophisticated people like you.
Sophistry. "many" according to which statistic? And just because some people consider that a trade is very favorable for them, doesn't it is not a trade and it doesn't mean they are correct - who's so naïve they can beat business people at their own game?
they +think they+ can beat business people
Plenty of people can also afford to subscribe to these without any issue. They don’t even know the price, they probably won’t even cancel it when they stop using it as they might not even realize they have a subscription.
By your logic, are the paid plans not sometimes free?
While it is true that sometimes you are the product even if you're paying, I don't think anyone is trying to argue that obviously paid plans are free.
Small recommendation: The diagrams on [https://wuu73.org/aicp] are helpful, but clicking them does not display the full‑resolution images; they appear blurry. This occurs in both Firefox and Chrome. In the GitHub repository, the same images appear sharp at full resolution, so the issue may be caused by the JavaScript rendering library.
Another data point: On Android Chrome they render without problem.
thx - i did not know that. Will try to fix.
How does your tool differ from this one? https://aider.chat/docs/usage/copypaste.html
If i am not wrong, aider uses repomap to select the context and pack it efficiently for LLM? this coupled with auto copy paste to and from chat web UI of AI provider?
Anecdotal, but Grok seems to have just introduced pretty restrictive rate limits. They’re now giving free users access to Grok 4 with a low limit and then making it difficult to manually switch to Grok 3 and continue. Will only allow a few more requests before pushing an upgrade to paid plans. Just started happening to me last night.
I built a relevant tool (approved by Apple this week) which may help reduce the friction of you having to constantly copy paste text between your app and the AI assistant in browser.
It's called SelectToSearch and it reduces my friction by 85% by automating all those copy paste etc actions with a single keyboard shortcut:
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/select-to-search-ai-assistant/...
do you really have 20+ tabs of LLMs open at a time?
some days.. it varies but a whole browser window is dedicated to it and always open
Very nice article and thx for the update.
I would be very interested in an in dept of your experiences of differences between Roo Code and Cline if you feel you can share that. I've only tried Roo Code (with interesting but mixed results) thus far.
Just use lmstudio.ai, it's what everyone is using nowadays
LM Studio is great, but it's a very different product from an AI-enabled IDE or a Claude Code style coding agent.
LM Studio is awesome
Note that the website is scrolling very slow, sub1-fps on Firefox Android. I'm also unable to scroll the call-out about grok. Also, there's this strange large green button reading CSS loaded at the top.
Works fine, Firefox Android 142.0b9
I scroll just fine on Vanadium, Duck browser and brave.
On Android?
FYI: the first AI you link to, " z.ai's GLM 4.5", actually links to zai.net, which appears to be a news site, instead of "chat.z.ai", which is what I think you intended.
Fun fact, zai[.]net seems to be an italian school magazine. As an italian I've never known about it, but the words pun got me laughing.
zai[.]net -> zainet -> zainetto -> which is the italian word for "little school backback"
oops. was using AI trying to fix some of the bugs and update it real fast with some newer models, since this post was trending here. Hopefully its scrolling better. Link fixed. I know its still ridiculous looking with some of the page but at least its readable for now.
I tried Cline with chatgpt 4.1 and I was charged - there are some free credits when you sign up for Cline that it used.
Not sure how you got it for free?
look up LLM7, and Pollinations AI. Both offer free GPT 4.1, but I am not sure how limited it is. They have tons more models but the names are different (openai-large = gpt-4.1)
Meta has free and generous APIs for the crappy Llama 4 models... they're okay at summarizing things but I have no idea if its any good for code. Prob not since no one even talks about those anymore.
GH Copilot is my guess. Not free, but $10 a month or free for students
Ahh I think this is mentioned in the blog post proper. Probably just ommited from the text comment.
Iwill try the free Windsurf tier using the prompts created and see if it can do it similar to 4.1
Is glm-4.5 air useable? I see it's free on Openrouter. Also pls advise what you think is the current best free openrouter model for coding. Thanks!
Well, if you download Qwen Code https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code it is free up to 2000 api calls a day.
Not sure if GLM-4.5 Air is good, but non-Air one is fabulous. I know for free API access there is pollinations ai project. Also llm7. If you just use the web chat's you can use most of the best models for free without API. There are ways to 'emulate' an API automatically.. I was thinking about adding this to my aicodeprep-gui app so it could automatically paste and then cut. Some MCP servers exist that you can use and it will automatically paste or cut from those web chat's and route it to an API interface.
OpenAI offers free tokens for most models, 2.5mil or 250k depending on model. Cerebras has some free limits, Gemini... Meta has plentiful free API for Llama 4 because.. lets face it, it sucks, but it is okay/not bad for stuff like summarizing text.
If you really wanted to code for exactly $0 you could use pollinations ai, in Cline extension (for VS Code) set to use "openai-large" (which is GPT 4.1). If you plan using all the best web chat's like Kimi K2, z.ai's GLM models, Qwen 3 chat, Gemini in AI Studio, OpenAI playground with o3 or o4-mini. You can go forever without being charged money. Pollinations 'openai-large' works fine in Cline as an agent to edit files for you etc.
Very cool, a lot to chew on here. Thanks so much for the feedback!
bro you are final boss of free tier users lol
damn right !!!!
Have you seen Microsoft's copilot? It is essentially free openai models
And to anyone who has ever used it, it appears more like opening smoothbrain. For a long time it was the only allowed model at work and even for basic cyber security questions it was sometimes completely useless.
I would not recommend it to anyone.
Which of their many Copilot products do you mean?
The regular copilot, copilot.microsoft.com
It was a bit difficult to trust the source after seeing the phrase "Nazi-adjacent" used in relation to Grok.
Qwen is totally useless any serious dev work.
It’s really hit and miss for me. Well defined small tasks seem ok. But every time I try some “agentic coding”, it burns through millions of tokens without producing anything working.
Which Qwen? They have over a dozen models now.