[wvenable]

I'm using Github copilot and I ran out of requests before the end of the month; this happens from time to time. But last month was the first time I decided to try the cheap models that were still accessible to me just to see what they were capable of. They're dumb as rocks.

I just don't know how many people have an overly negative opinion on AI assisted coding because they've just used the poor versions of these products given out for cheap/free. A similar critique is basing one's opinion on AI based on summary that Google provides for free in their search.

[Aurornis]

This article comes from a niche of people who read a lot of news articles about LLMs (links scattered throughout) but have also avoided learning about the tools directly.

Like you said, the models available on free trials are usually toys compared to what developers use. Even Opus and GPT-5.5 are available on $20/month plans and you can buy a single month to try it out. The way they write about paying for a tool seeming "absurd and horrific" says it all about the level of actual research that went into their understanding. It's entirely based on news headlines.

[bigstrat2003]

So the free trial, designed to convince you that it's worth paying, doesn't well? That isn't the users' fault, that is the companies' fault. If a free trial sucks it's perfectly rational to not pay just in case the paid version doesn't suck.

[wvenable]

Not free trials, free versions.

Certainly if the user gets a bad impression from the free version that's on the provider but if you're writing about it then you shouldn't get to be that ignorant.

[satvikpendem]

Which models did you try? Open weight ones like Qwen and DeepSeek are getting pretty good, you just need the right harness, via OpenCode or Pi. I use Qwen 3.6 27B on my laptop with Unsloth Studio (Unsloth releases a lot of good quantizations and has great support for the latest features, recently released MTP support which can 2x token generation speed with no loss of accuracy).

[ge96]

Get your company to pay for it (points to head)

[wvenable]

Oh they do. And I could get them to pay even more but with the changes to copilot licensing, I'm not sure we will continue with it.

[ge96]

Is claude code any better for the value

[satvikpendem]

Codex is the best value for money now in my usage.