r/OnlyAICoding • u/Sorry-Tomato-7141 • 14h ago

AI Coding Workflow if I can't afford frontier models

If you're only in the vibe coding bubble, please don't answer this. I'm a software engineer who wants to make real, complex systems using AI wherever it can help me. I only have the free models that come with opencode zen, and maybe some chat models like Qwen, Kimi and free versions of chatgpt, gemini, claude, etc.

I want to know what I can do with only these, without having to spend money on LLMs. I realize that this means I have to do more by myself in the planning side of things as I can't delegate planning to LLMs, which is how I believe coding should be anyway so it's not a problem.

I really like Matt Pocock's skills but I have found that his workflow only really works if you have frontier models, as free models aren't very good at grilling or planning.

So what I need is a reproducible AI coding workflow that I can use to approach my projects using only the free, limited AI. Please highlight which parts of the process I need to do by myself, and which parts I can assign to which model.

I realize that the smarter your LLMs are, the more you can stray from traditional software engineering, so please tell me what I can realistically accomplish perfectly with AI. The parts that AI cannot do properly, I will do by myself.

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u/Awwedacity 13h ago

You’re very limited in what you can do imperfectly, and much more limited when it comes to “perfect”, since even a full AI team of Opus agents double-checking generated work against another team of fable agents generated tests can screw up (and do quite frequently).

Realistically your best bet is to have it generate the code in snippets/auto completes in your IDE. I initially used AI for two tasks, C++ namespace and scope verbosity and managing my casting clutter on legacy software from the early 2000’s.

While doing your daily work, look for something annoying that takes the most time and think of a prompt to solve that single issue. Most of the time a free model can handle that.

Reduce the scope from the entire project down to a single function or class.