Post #1926509

2026-03-14 12:20 UTC

Also I don't have a job currently, I'm busy full time with childcare and prepping our move abroad, and plan to look for a job or freelance contracts right after that. I feel like trying out some AI coding tools is going to be a requirement in my job search, so not sure I have the luxury to have a strict "AI, not even once" policy.

Replies (1)

@NIGHTEN@hi.nighten.fr 2026-03-14 17:15

@fvsch I haven’t seen others suggesting it, but if you want to spend no money especially on the big AI labs I’d recommend taking a look at Open Code; it’s a CLI tool that let you use a variety of models. I’m suggesting this one because they often (always?) have open source models available for free (without requiring an account I might add). And even if you want to pay for them they are very inexpensive compared to the big ones; and way less energy consuming as well. Minimax M2.5 is for example very efficient and capable for its size (I don’t know if it’s still free but it was for a while). For your job search in particular, I think you could get away with nodding sagely if they ask you if you use it; if you can name drop some key words like MCP or Skills I don’t think there is any way for them to check to which extend you use those tools.

Open ##1926510