With the release of Qwen 3.8 Max and it's insane 98% discount during 'off-peak' hours and 90% discount during regular hours, I decided to download ...
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Ok, update, I just hit usage cap on Lite. Apparently, they have a monthly cap on it. But what's interesting, is that Lite finished the entire set of tasks first, committed and pushed... Then only did it enforce the usage cap. Which means even when you eventually (for me it was probably 100k+ LOC across the 4 projects concurrently) hit the Lite cap, they dont leave you dead in the water, it finishes first, then stops. Which other platform finishes up before it hits cap?
Here's an idea of what it did when cap hit... Those requirements were set during the first prompt, a few days ago. It still enforces it and 20 of this round of edits were done after I had hit the Lite usage cap on another agent. Instead of stopping dead in it's tracks, it kept going, finishing not only the active edit, but all the edits and still pushed to git before it enforced the cap. And that's just what Qoder offers for free, to everyone... Even without any billing details or anything added beyond a generic 'sign in with google'. I am thoroughly impressed.
What are you building? It doesn't seem small. Can you give me the link?
Wow! So you have built your own game engine for your DEV embedded games?? That's cool! I have to try those games.
The game engine for the DEV games is pretty lightweight, it's more to just speed things up, though I havent had much time for them. As for what I'm building, Dwarven Stronghold (think Dwarf Fortress), but written in Rust, currently sitting around 730k LOC, I figured DF is heavy because of how much memory it uses, so in Rust, I can make it zero-allocation, use a merkle root for tracking game state and attach a LLM and ElevenLabs to it, so you can hear dwarves' inner thoughts when you click on them. I'm also working on adding FPS mode, TPS mode (so you can control a dwarf, instead of just watch a simulation) and hopefully VR mode too. But Right now it's just a 730k lines big simulation, it still needs ALOT of work...
Sounds like a wonderful project! Waiting for the release...
Haven't touched Qoder but I've been living in Qwen the last couple weeks anyway — Qwen3-TTS for a voice cloning pipeline, Qwen Cloud for an invoice-reconciliation agent I built for a hackathon. Same story on pricing from the API side and the quality gap you're describing is real, not hype.
Might actually download Qoder just to see that live cost breakdown you mentioned — that's the part nobody else does.
Definitely give Qoder a try. Could be subjective, but I find that for long-horizon tasks, it does a much better job staying consistent. Eg. I told it to start pushing to git, that was 20 prompts ago and in that time it's written over 50k LOC on Lite, the tier that's supposed to be bad? I've also been hammering Lite, fully free and it's blowing my mind how I've never heard of this platform yet! Seriously, it's worth downloading for the Better Loop and Wiki Generator alone. Every other AI orchestrator platform has just been a copy-paste of eachother, Qoder is the first 1 I found that actually adds value from a platform side. Also it's fully free for BYOK (havent dug too much, but looks like just Chinese models supported), but still cool that it's available for free with what I'd describe as the most robust orchestration layer I've seen to date. The models dont drift and they've been exceptionally consistent with writing unit tests. It also picked up gaps that Sonnet, Opus, Gemini Pro, GTP SOL, all missed. That alone makes it worth giving a shot atleast.
Do note, all of this is my honest, unaffiliated opinion. I wholeheartedly recommend giving Qoder a try
50k LOC over 20 prompts on the free tier without drift is the number that'll actually get me to download it... Thanks
And the usage isnt hidden in some obscure subsystem. You click on your usage, you click view details, it takes you to this page.
And to just show you I'm not kidding about it actually being LIVE usage stats.
the screenshots land better than the free-tier claim did .
Quest Mode showing the same log format on both Lite and Ultimate means it's not a stripped-down free version, it's the same system with a different bill attached.
$5.76 for 38 minutes on Ultimate is the number I'd actually budget against, not the $0.00 rows. Is that Ultimate rate pre- or post-discount??
Ultimate isnt discounted at all. Those were free Ultimate calls they gave (200 to claim once off, 1000 every 2nd day sofar. Ultimate is priced at 1x credit rate, whereas different tiered models work at different % of credit rate. Eg. Qwen 3.8 Max is at 90% discount during peak hours, 98% off-peak. Translating to 0.1 and 0.01x credit rate respectively. But I get what you mean.
Here's some I did during off-peak. So they show real rate and the discounted rate. Qwen charges directly to credits, which I used via the pro-trial, so these are the real numbers you'd get billed, with vs without (striked out) the discount.
Pay attention to rate before vs after 4pm. Off-peak by me translates to 4pm-2am.
No way, you're just finding out too... Well, I guess it's because we have way too many tools like this over here — hard to keep track.🤣
Honestly, I'm loving it! I've been building V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. IDE and it didnt just help me build out the entire agentic browser (from scratch), but using their system made me realize just how 'stupid' the go-to agentic IDEs are. Seriously, the fact they built in codebase analysis with patch generating and an entire Wikis generator. It made me expand the scope of velocity to include those. Cuz a wikis tied to a merkle root site-map as agent context means it's a VC system that tracks state, not just code. The codebase analysis, while they use AI to do most of the analysis, you can see they have a pretty solid setup for pattern detection that isnt inherent to a model. They did a really good job with it and it blows my mind the more I use it. For perspective, Lite mode, I've now pushed close to 100k LOC through it, that's 10s of millions of tokens... For free, on an unpaid account, without ever hitting 'high traffic' or 'fair-usage' blocks. It just works and it works well... Writing Rust isnt easy and it's doing a phenomenal job. It's faster and smarter than Gemini 3.6 flash, that's something I can confidently say.
Maybe you could also give DevEco Code by Huawei a try — GLM 5.1 is free to use, up to 50 requests per minute. Not sure if there'd be any network restrictions on your end though.
Download started. Thanks for the headsup! Though it seems to lean heavily on HarmonyOS, is it OS restrictive in terms of what platform it can build for?
Nah, you're good. The CLI tool (npm install -g @deveco/deveco-code) works as a standalone AI coding assistant — GLM-5.1 is built-in, free, unlimited, 50 req/min. No HarmonyOS toolchain required to use the AI features.
The HarmonyOS lock-in is only for the full IDE (DevEco Studio) when you need to compile, debug, or run on actual devices. But if you just want to try GLM-5.1 for coding, the CLI alone does the job. Worth a shot since it's literally free 😏
And you've been gatekeeping this all this time why? That's incredible! I'm definitely gunna give it a run and see what it can do. Honestly Qoder was the turning point for me... The Cloudflare Workers AI hook I built for Kimi K2.7 was a good experiment, but it started me down the rabbit hole of exploring Eastern models more and IDEs too, usually it's a bit iffy, cuz of the language barrier and some models being trained almost explicitly on Chinese and it tends to through characters out mid session (surprisingly though, none more than Google's Gemini... Odd...). But Qoder and just the features they built in, like the Wikis and knowledge cards. I've been exploring it a bit and honestly, I can see why the East is winning the AI race... While Codex, Cursor, Antigravity, Claude, Copilot all fight for user-base, they do it by doing a few token refreshes, or giving you the 'privilege' of using their most expensive model on a subscription you pay for, at the rate it's charged at... Vs Qoder actually adds useful features AND freebies and the models supported are cheaper in general. I signed a sub today for Qoder, fact that the wikis and knowledge cards stay up to date is a game-changer, cuz that's persisted doesnt matter what model you use and it just works. But Imma give DevEco a try, GLM 5.1 for free sounds like it can be pretty useful.
The live cost breakdown is the part I’d trust more than the headline model ranking. For personal projects, the failure mode is usually not 'can it edit 20k LOC once'; it is whether the tool keeps a clean diff, remembers the constraint, and makes the next rollback obvious when it gets too confident.
It does an honestly exceptional job. To put in perspective, I threw it at Dwarven Stronghold on Lite mode. That's a 150k LOC Rust codebase, with deeply integrated simulation logic and over 700 Tests. It keeps it accurate and keeps implementations clean... Even on Lite.
And that's where it started at in Qoder. It's up to 968 tests and pushing closer to 230k LOC now. Still keeping the instructions clean that I gave it at step 1. Which is strict Zero-Allocation and flat arrays. I added inbetween for it too, like adding Git and saying it should commit at stable states and keeping documentation up to date. It's been flawless at it.
In Qoder, the notification appears on the left side, which hides the terminal. Do you know how to move it to the right side? I couldn't figure out how.
Not quite sure, I've been using it for Rust and I havent really had any popups, though Qoder's settings are quite extensive, you'll likely find it there for notification, popups, popover, notice, info, information, status, etc. You can also try searching "Left" and see if anything pops up there, you might find it? Sorry I cant be more help, cuz it doesnt pop up by me for practically anything other than advertisements, you can try the settings in the popup to see if it doesnt give any info what feature it's tied to?
I feel bad for calling the Lite model "Lite". It's not lite at all...
Ikr, it's like a whole new world opens up when you realize there's more to AI than Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. You can also try OpenRouter, there's often free models on, like Nemotron Ultra (from Nvidia), though limited in the amount of calls you can make. You can also try out Cloudflare's Worners AI, Kimi K2.7 is on there and you get a few free calls a day (though you can just make a few dummy accounts with a few spare emails and hot-swap them. Note, that wont work for OpenRouter, or Qoder, they're smarter than that)
Found out something new about Qoder yesterday, it actually has some pretty solid windows automation capability. I just see it saying 'taking control of windows' and next moment it's like antigravity's browser, but my entire windows environment, so it can go and test a webMCP demo I made 😂