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What's the current best free ($) coding assistant? I like Gemini + VS Code, but it seems a little hamstrung by what VS Code extensions are allowed to do.


I'm actually curious about this too.

I've been experimenting with having Claude write the code and DeepSeek analyze, pasting the analysis into Claude to modify the code, rinse and repeat.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, they have come up with an almost fully standards compliant LALR parser for APL -- which is notoriously hard to parse. DeepSeek gets in there "nice and deep, boy" and shakes out all the corner cases while Claude does a fairly good job of implementing the fixes without breaking anything else. Just a few more round and...

But, as one might imagine, this isn't very practical for anything other than just playing around as I have to copy/paste code into the two different chat windows.

I suppose I could get them to write an extension for gedit (my preferred 'code editor'), hmm...


I get by just fine with Codeium on VS Code, although lately I have been getting some crashes


vscode with cline or roo + openrouter + free models. The latest free gemini ones are pretty ok.




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