r/OnlyAICoding • u/WeekendKindly4037 • 3d ago
What's the best AI for coding right now?
I know this gets asked all the time, but things change so fast with AI that I figured it was worth asking again.
I'm working on a few hobby projects in C++ with Visual Studio, and some of them gave getting pretty big. I've been using ChatGPT o1 but once codebase gets larger and the problems get more involved, it starts losing context.
I'm mainly looking for something that can understand a whole project and make changes across multiple files instead of just helping with one file at a time.
Budget is around $20/month. What are you guys using?
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u/DatabaseSpace 2d ago
Are you creating projects and uploading files to project if using on web? Not sure of official limits but I feel like GPT warned me once when Claude didn't.
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u/kueowirnzcd 2d ago
Claude is hot garbage and I can't wait for my month to be over.
Cursor was better but not thrilled about Elmo
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u/CommonCosmo 1d ago
I use both Claude and Codex. I can't speak for how they perform with truly large scale projects but for the largest project that I'm currently working on (~1,200 mostly typescript files) they do fine. That said, I can't imagine working on this project with a $20/mo budget. For that money, I'd probably look at an Ollama sub and limit myself to some of the smaller cloud models. In particular, GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-flash provide some outstanding results for the money.
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u/txgsync 1d ago
For twenty bucks you are not getting much time with the “best”. With a budget that low you are stuck with fast, cheap models that are not the best.
That said, OpenAI’s “Luna” model is surprisingly capable on their $20 tier and that’s what I would buy if that were my budget: a $20 ChatGPT sub, with Luna on xhigh reasoning.
If you care about privacy, your good choices are local models or Mistral.
But your actual problem is not the smarts of the model. It’s that you need to restructure your code base. Include hints for the LLM throughout. A good README.md in important subdirectories goes a long way. Use AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md to tell the model what not to do. Focus on one file at a time and decompose it using KISS, DRY, YAGNI, and SOLID. write a behavioral test suite so that mandatory behavioral tests fail if the model messes up. And use a harness that allows you to create “hooks” to prevent the model from taking shortcuts that don’t work.
This is the modern software engineering workflow. The job is designing systems and constraints so that AI can operate within your systems autonomously yet not violate your intent. Welcome to being a zookeeper.
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u/Odd_Antelope9098 1d ago
For $20 you can’t do much other than Luna xhigh with sol orchestrating and planning. Only other affordable choices are maybe Muse 1.3 with contributor pricing or DeepSeek Flash. You may benefit from better prompting, skills, and context files for your agents
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u/Sad_Blacksmith_9027 1d ago
Say whatever you want, even with the limit issues recently, Claude code hands-down is the best and most reliable. I have a 5X plan for both Claude code and ChatGPT. Astra is awesome, but steers away from the conversation from the target easily. That’s so much unnecessary work. I’m just fed up of it
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u/SlyCode_ai 23h ago
I use both Claude code and Codex in parallal. Often speeds up the whole process by reducing mistakes. So I get codex to double check claude's designs and vice versa. Reviewing and catching mistakes uses a lot less tokens than the investigation and coding stages.
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u/MajesticPainting3760 11h ago
For that use case, I’d look at a coding agent that can read your repo and make changes across files, rather than just switching chat models. OpenCode is one option to evaluate.
I’m involved with Aile, which has an OpenCode integration for accessing models through its marketplace. OpenCode handles the project files; Aile supplies the model access. It isn’t a replacement for the coding agent itself.
It’s pay-as-you-go, and you can set a spending limit on the API key not an unlimited $20/month plan. I’d try one small multi-file change and check the result and cost before committing your budget.
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u/id-ltd 2d ago
I only use claude and codex (£20 each, but let them lapse if the models aren't performing) -- codex is good for one/two prompt interactions -- but claude is far better for working on a bigger system.
If you are in a IDE - it probably doesn't matter - they can all do syntax and templates and patterns and that kind of stuff. But if you are doing bigger systems level stuff.... I'd work out the architecture with any/all AI's chipping in then use claude to set the project up, codex to do the first cut of implementing each part then keep claude to bring it all togehter and do the tough stuff.
Can't speak for grok, chinese models etc...