The Free AI Coding Tool Landscape Just Changed and Here Is What I Switched To

I've been bouncing between free AI coding tools for about eight months now. Not because I enjoy the constant context-switching — I don't — but because the free tiers keep changing. One month Copilot's generous, the next they throttle completions. So you adapt. Last week I finally settled on a setup I'm actually happy with, and the catalyst was Gemini Code Assist dropping its paid wall entirely. My old setup (and why it fell apart) For most of late March I was running Copilot's free tier inside VS Code. It worked. The completions were decent for boilerplate — React components, SQL queries, that sort of thing. But I kept hitting the monthly suggestion cap at the worst possible moments. Always mid-sprint, always on a Friday afternoon. I tried supplementing with Codeium. Fine for autocomplete, weak on multi-file reasoning. If I asked it to refactor a service layer that touched three files, it'd confidently edit two and hallucinate imports from a package that didn't exist. Gemini Code Assis