Been playing with a lot of free AI tools for code generation recently

Here’s my takeaways on each:

Protocol OS. Creator of onchain experiments. Nothing I say/share is financial advice.

- Claude: high quality, slowish responses. Easy to hit free limits
- DeepSeek: high quality, annoying it only streams response when viewing page
- Gemini: by far fastest, mid answers. Will use if trying to do simple things quick

- v0: best for visual elements and main tool that doesn’t hit size limits with large files
- Grok: surprisingly good at generating working code but not as code-friendly as other tools
- Copilot: my default for vscode, don’t use for large-scale codegen

- ChatGPT: primarily use after hitting usage limits on others
- Cursor: only started using recently so can’t judge yet. Not mind blown yet
- Claude agent: only started using recently but got ~80% the way there on codebase-wide coding tasks, needed hand-holding

Still aiming to check out Windsurf, OpenRouter, and some other tools

I’m also sure the above list will change over time as the models + tools change/improve