Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
Free local AI is promising, but wasted time costs more than subscriptions.
Random, unexplained edits made the code worse each iteration.
Without screenshots, fixing Xcode errors became a slog.
Well, that's a bummer. After using the free and local (as in on my own computer) combination of Goose, Ollama, and Qwen3-coder to build a simple WordPress plugin, I had high hopes that I might be able to give up my expensive Claude Code subscription and use a free alternative. To be fair, back when I was working on the test plugin, it took Goose five tries to get it right (more than any other AI), but it got there eventually.
Also: I tried a Claude Code rival that's local, open source, and completely free - how it went
Paying OpenAI or Anthropic a few hundred bucks a month to get their cloud AIs to write code for me is a fairly big expense. So I've been exploring the combination of Goose, Ollama, and Qwen3-coder to see if, together, it might replace my Claude Code subscription.
Nope. Nopity-nope-nope.
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