You might be too late to enjoy the era of $5 Ubers in SF, but you can still get a ride for free with AI. I’m absolutely hooked on using any available free AI models. Cursor will randomly announce that a new model is free for a week or whatever and I’m fucking there. Remember that time SOTA models were available for free? That was last week, and it’s hard to say how long this sort of spending will continue.

Opus 4.5 was free for a while, and it did get me hooked on the model. I had tried Sonnet 4.5 a number of times but found it annoyingly cheerful and not as good as GPT-5.1 (granted GPT-5.1 came out way later). Now that I’m faced with having to pay for Opus 4.5, I am certainly tempted and I can see why so many are willing to jump on Claude Code.

GitHub’s Copilot is giving me their monthly free open source subscription to a limited Copilot plan. I like how they’re still using the old Cursor pricing billed by requests rather than tokens. You can get quite a few things done with that. Google’s antigravity is interesting, but so far it seems to expire before it gets anywhere. I think the one takeaway from chasing free credits is that all the VS Code forks are now basically the same, assuming they have a plan feature. The furthest behind might be Gemini’s VS Code extension, which is a fairly shit experience. I’ve tried some free models and bounced off because they produce more slop than anything useful. Grok’s models are all shit so far.

What did I build?

I launched a paid plan for xmplaylist.com and improved a number of my open source projects. I’d say the best use of these free credits has been nice little admin pages that I never would have spent time building. I can point the agent at enough examples that it needs hardly any direction to get it done. I only really do TypeScript in my free time and I’m sometimes jealous of the Django admins in other languages. Slop together a similar admin with TypeScript and drizzle and you’ve likely got a better dev experience than any Django app.

I’m sure the free tokens will be locked down soon. I’m riding around as much as I can.

Some random predictions for 2027:

• People will use smaller models to save money and because they’ve caught up in performance. I’m hopeful for Gemini 3 Flash and not hopeful for SOTA getting cheaper.
• Cursor will have to drop the price on their composer-1 model (which works great)
• At least 2 more VS Code forks will launch
• I’ll still be chasing free SOTA models
• Grok will continue to be 2nd rate
• I’ll actually pay for a personal plan from some provider

TODO:

• try windsurf