10 free AI tools I actually use in 2026 (no paywall, no catch)

hao yang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:09:48 +0000

The boring truth about "free AI" in 2026

Most lists are affiliate farms. This one is not. Every tool below has a real free tier that I personally use — for writing, coding, image generation, audio, and research. I am not affiliated with any of them, and I paid nothing.

My daily stack

ChatGPT (free tier) — still the fastest for quick "what is the regex for…" moments.
Claude (free tier) — better at long-form reasoning and reading PDFs.
Gemini — solid for Google-Workspace-adjacent tasks.
Hugging Face Spaces — thousands of niche models, no signup for most of them.
Perplexity — citations, no hallucinations, free for short answers.
Codex CLI / Claude Code — terminal coding agents with free or trial tiers.
Ollama — run open-source models locally. Free forever, you pay in RAM.
Stable Diffusion Web UI — image generation, no rate limit, on your GPU.
Whisper — speech-to-text, runs offline, multi-language.
TTS via the browser — built-in, surprisingly good for quick voiceovers.

How to actually get value out of them

Do not pay for everything. Most paid plans exist to remove a 3-message-per-day limit. If you batch your work, free is enough.
Run small models locally for private work. Ollama + a 7B model fits on most laptops now.
Mix tools. ChatGPT for draft, Claude for edit, Perplexity for facts. Each one has a strength.

The catch

There is not one, honestly. Just do not expect GPT-5 quality from a 3B local model. Pick the right tool for the size of the job.

What did I miss? Drop your favorite free tool in the comments.

Codex CLI in 10 minutes: a hands-on tour for the curious dev

hao yang — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:08:45 +0000

What Codex CLI actually is

I kept seeing Codex CLI show up in my feed and finally gave it a real weekend. Here is the short version: it is a terminal-based coding agent from OpenAI that you can drive from your shell, in your repo, with a single command. If you have used Claude Code, it will feel familiar — but it is a separate product with its own personality.

The 5 commands I actually use

Command	What it does
`codex`	Opens an interactive REPL in the current dir
`codex "fix the failing test in foo.ts"`	One-shot prompt, exits when done
`codex --approval-mode full-auto`	Lets it run shell commands itself
`codex --quiet`	Suppresses the chatty tool-call logs
`codex /review`	Loads a code-review sub-agent

A small but useful trick

I aliased it in my shell config so I never have to remember flags:

alias cx='codex --quiet --approval-mode full-auto'

Now cx "refactor this to use the new SDK" is my default. It still asks before destructive ops, but skips the "y/n" loop for read-only steps.

Where it surprised me

It reads your repo first. A 1-shot prompt behaves very differently depending on whether the project has a README, a CI config, or nothing.
It explains its plan before editing. You can interrupt with Esc and steer.
It is not magic on big refactors. Same lesson as every agent in 2026: small, well-scoped tasks win.

Try this on your own code

Pick a 50-line file you do not love. Run codex "rewrite this file in a more modern style, keep behavior identical" and just watch. 10 minutes, no commitment.

That is it. Have fun.

DEV Community: hao yang