Ask HN: Cheapest way to use LLM coding assistance?

3 points by iamlucaswolf 2y ago ↗ HN

I would like to toy around with LLM assistance (Chat/Copilot) for my coding side projects. Given that I will only use this sporadically (20hrs per week max, with variation between weeks), I was wondering if there was a cheaper way to access these tools than paying for an OpenAI/GitHub Copilot subscription.

Has someone here done the math on self-hosting on the cloud/running locally/using the APIs directly/just paying for the subscriptions?

Some additional details on my specific situation (but also interested in general considerations):

- I’m living in Germany (26ct/kWh, no access to Claude) - I already have access to a box with 64GB RAM, no GPU though)

4 comments

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AtomicOrbital 2y ago ↗

checkout the cody extension https://github.com/sourcegraph/cody available for various editors like vscode

iamlucaswolf 2y ago ↗

Thanks, that seems to be exactly what I was looking for!

Any insights on the business model? Is this just to advertise the pro tier or do they monetize usage in another way (e.g. selling training data)?

jdorfman 2y ago ↗

Advertise pro. Sourcegraph doesn't sell or retain data with any LLM providers for both free and pro versions https://sourcegraph.com/terms/cody-notice

b-mmxx 2y ago ↗

Cody was mentioned already. Continue [0] is another tool that you could give a shot, load local llm etc.

[0] https://github.com/continuedev/continue