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radio879last Sunday at 1:00 AM15 repliesview on HN

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 This is a bit outdated, AI stuff goes at high speed.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


Replies

stuart73547373last Sunday at 2:54 PM

(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

teifererlast Sunday at 5:47 AM

> 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".

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racecar789last Sunday at 5:37 AM

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.

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faangguyindialast Monday at 12:39 PM

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?

tummlerlast Sunday at 12:21 PM

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.

busymom0last Sunday at 6:14 PM

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/...

maxiepoolast Sunday at 11:51 AM

do you really have 20+ tabs of LLMs open at a time?

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PeterStuerlast Sunday at 5:40 AM

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.

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cropcirclbureaulast Sunday at 8:07 AM

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.

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dcuthbertsonlast Sunday at 10:22 AM

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.

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VagabundoPlast Sunday at 4:25 PM

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?

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indigodaddylast Sunday at 1:12 AM

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!

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ya3rlast Sunday at 6:09 AM

Have you seen Microsoft's copilot? It is essentially free openai models

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frumplestlatzlast Monday at 5:01 AM

It was a bit difficult to trust the source after seeing the phrase "Nazi-adjacent" used in relation to Grok.

hgarglast Sunday at 4:42 AM

Qwen is totally useless any serious dev work.

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