Web Chatbots

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A variety of companies provide some of their most advanced AI models as interactive web chatbots, mostly for no fee.

Keep in mind:

• These typically require a user account.
• These are good for straightforward questions, but not as good as other tools for complex multi-step tasks like software development.
• All of these services save all your interactions for a variety of reasons, including future training data.

Suggestions:

• Google AI Studio (Gemini) - Good all-around chatbot, plus some other models.
• Claude - The expensive option.
• OpenAI (ChatGPT) - Popular, probably overrated.
• Twitter (Grok) - Surprisingly good at debugging.
• Mistral - From France.
• Microsoft (Copilot) - The OpenAI models again.
• Deepseek - From China. A large model.
• Alibaba (Qwen)

API Coding Tools

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Tools:

• aider - (Recommended) This provides chat-based programming assistance using various APIs.
• Cline if you really like VSCode, then cline provides a similar workflow as an IDE plugin.

Chat-based tools are strongly recommended over autocomplete-based tools. I recommend fully disabling autocomplete in your editor; it’s a distraction.

The APIs gateways:

• OpenRouter - Provides access to a broad variety of models, both free and paid.
• Google AI Studio, Claude, etc

Local AI tools:

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• ollama
• llama.cpp
• Kobold.cpp - Chat interface

Running open source models locally provides maximum control, but requires a pretty powerful PC to run anything but the smallest models.

A decent model to start playing with locally on a 10-16GB GPU is Qwen3-14B.

If you have a new Mac or Ryzen with a lot of unified memory (e.g. 64GB+) you should be able to run bigger models like Qwen3-Coder-30B.