The half-life of "free AI coding setup" articles is set by their most specific line. The architecture advice survives; the model IDs don't. From this year alone: gemini-2.0-flash-exp — retired. deepseek-r1:free on OpenRouter — gone. llama-3.3-70b-versatile on Groq — Enterprise-only now. Any guide pinning those (mine included, until re-verified) walks you into provider errors on day one.
The durable version of the advice is a procedure, not a list: pick the assistant (Cline, aider, Continue — all fine), then resolve the model at setup time from the provider's live catalog (/v1/models or OpenRouter's public list), preferring IDs without version-pinned suffixes. Re-resolve when errors appear.
Assistants compared, with model choices kept current: https://toolfreebie.com/free-ai-coding-assistants/
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