Ask HN: What is the best bang for buck budget AI coding?
I'm trying to learn AI coding (already have multiple years experience with "normal" programming in various languages.) I want to know how to make my budget (about $30/month) go furthest.
At the moment, I am using:
Z.ai $6/month plan:
Ok model (GLM 4.7) It seems to rate limit/throttle aggressively if I use it a lot.
and
Github copilot $10/month plan:
Seems to reduce model context to 100k tokens, and only offers unlimited access to smaller model (GPT5-mini, Grok Code Fast 1 etc). These models are ok for making precise edits to specific code, but they seem to get stuck when the program is large and has a lot of concurrency etc.
I also have free plans for web/mobile-chat for every model I can find.
I only have older computers, so editors like Cursor or Antigravity are too slow to be usable. So I prefer something that can work with a CLI (opencode preferably).
Do I already have the best deal? Or is there something I am missing. When I try to compare plans, it is confusing and they are not often clear about actual usage limits.
Are Codex or Claude even options at this price point if I want to code for multiple hours per day?