My budget right now is ~$10/month, so my choices are based on cost, and the ability to get shit done. I’ve been using Opencode.
preference ranked descending
opencode/big-pickle
This one has been good at helping me find bugs. When I have it write code to fix a bug, new bugs often occur as side effects. It’s good at fixing the side effects too, but sometimes it takes a few attempts. I’ve seen improvements when I give the AI instructions in AGENTS.md such as, “validate all code before considering it done.” In AGENTS.md, I included examples of using tsc and svelte-check and that seemed to help.
opencode-go/kimi-k2.5
This one seems good at everything. I’ve made a couple game prototypes (rust & typescript) with this and I was pleased. It usually fails the first few times, but I feed it the errors I see in my console and it eventually gets it right. The problem? I have to spend about $5 a day. Too much money.
openrouter/z-ai/glm-4.5-air:free
openrouter/openrouter/elephant-alpha
This one is unusually fast, and it’s free, but it does a lot of bullshitting which limits it’s usefulness.
openrouter/minimax/minimax-m2.5:free
This one seems like it could be good, but it regularly stops mid-thought. I am forced to re-send the query, but it stops mid-thought again. Is there some sort of limiter on this guy?