If you are still avoiding premium subcriptions for LLMs/AI, look for Google’s “AI Studio” and try using “Gemini 2.5 Pro”. It’s “experimental” so it’s free right now. Just with a slow rate limit.
Cool things I’ve done with it recently:
Vibe-coded some changes to a landing page. Generated some fun SVGs with animations.
Asked for some specific summaries of YouTube videos. (Unsurprisingly, it has great access to YouTube content).
Used it as a model selection in Cline. (A free VS Code plugin).
Meanwhile, yes! ChatGPT's image generation stuff is very cool. It still fails hilariously sometimes. But if you haven't heard about ChatGPT "imagegen" doing room redecorating/remodeling, it's worth seeing some recent examples.
I’m involved in a sort of AI club at work. I’ve gotten to try out most of the latest stuff (Cline, Claude, Google AI Studio, Cursor, etc). And I get to see how they work in real life, complex scenarios. 🤷🏻♂️ AMA?
Summary of observation:
Everything works best when you already know what you need. And even better if you know an ideal way to ask for it.
One way to get closer to ideal asking: Ask it to help you ask. Don’t try to get answers immediately. Have a bit of back and forth first.
I love to start a lot and finish a little.
So I made myself launch a project, from beginning to end.
It’s called 52owls, and it’s silly.
I had a bunch of things I wanted to learn or sharpen up:
Some recent advancements in web scraping and “enrichment”.
An end to end system that can amass and import items, and generate sales copy and unique call-to-action.
Updating knowledge on two different web frameworks.
Lots about Coolify, a self-hosting platform.
… and a bunch of other nerd stuff.
Instead of doing 10 disparate little things with no output (other than the learning, of course), I put them all together and into the world.
Now there’s some much more realistic “side project” stuff I’m interested in building.
But I’m not in a hurry. More soon.
E started swim lessons again. She is stoked. Right before her second class, they had to shut the pool down. Hashtag disappointment. Hashtag “code brown”. 😬 🫠
I didn't get to be present at the first two sessions.
I'm very much looking forward to being in person at the next!