[armanckeser]

If your aim is to just get started, get yourself a Claude account and just download Claude Code. You don't really have to read anything on it, as you use agents you will get to learn what they are good and bad at but defaults are quite good anyway if you use a capable model like Opus 5. Truth is there are a million guides and plugins in the open but they really provide incremental gains for a beginner as they would overwhelm you.

If you are more conscious of the price, try out opencode or pi and research OpenRouter or similar for coding with models like GLM 5.2 or Kimi K3 or even Deepseek 4, they will be less out of the box but cheaper.

[e-topy]

I have been using OpenRouter for a while now, and my Uni is self hosting Kimi K2.7 and Qwen 3.5, so I do know my way around chat completion. I've tried Claude Code with Kimi but it just felt confusing to use (probably cause I didn't know what I was doing) and the results were bad (probably because the codebase I've inherited is a mess, and it can't comprehend the web server logs actively lying (and neither can I)).

I've heard Claude Code alternatives can be better for non-claude models, but again, which ones? How can I tell if a tool is good or bad when everyone has the same LLM'd readme? How can I avoid security nightmares like OpenCode when they seem so popular?