One tip for AI-assisted coding: companies often run promotions offering their latest models for free for a limited time. By jumping between those, you can get a lot of mileage.
For example, right now:
- Gemini 3 Pro (high) is free through Antigravity
- Grok code is free through Cursor
Sometimes companies want to gather feedback from models before releasing them, so they offer them for free through a popular editor under a pseudonym - it's worth keeping an eye out for those too.
My go-to right now is:
- Composer 1 (Cursor's first model) for easy tasks, because it's the fastest
- GPT-5.1 Codex for anything else, because it's the smartest
Even if other models are free, and faster than GPT-5.1, I find that using anything other than the smartest option ends up wasting time.