TL;DR It works. It's cheap. It's VERY slow.¶
Via OpenRouter, https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder. Start it like this:
aider --model openrouter/qwen/qwen3-coder`
It's SO cheap¶
I only used it for part of a day, but I literally spent a total of $0.10 on Q3C to do 5 small tasks for about 300 lines of changes.
It basically works¶
As far as I can recall it didn't take much back-and-forth or prompt tweaking to get those tasks done, but I didn't keep clear notes.g
It's SO slow¶
It's so slow that several times I thought it was hung. Like, waiting minutes for anything at all. Maybe it was just a bad day?
I first suspected, based on the provider status page at the time, that it was the Deepinfra provider struggling, since I seemed to get automatically routed there (at the time of writing this it was by far the cheapest provider), and they seemed a bit on fire.
But even after I removed that provider from my config, I got very slow responses; sometimes 5-10 minutes to respond with a 50-line diff.
At one point, I hit Ctrl-C and said "looks like you were hung, try again"; I'm
not sure, but this may have been what got us into a state where it nuked most of the
content of the file it was trying to work on, and committed that (without asking
me)! It took me a minute to realize that had happened and get the code back...
Overall, Q3C seems to do a fine job at tasks where I'm content to walk away and do something else while it works, or even go to sleep and see what happened in the morning.
But for interactive use, it's just not usable.
Here's a (blurry) ~ 6 minute demo gif, where I told it to fix a github issue (about adding permalinks to various parts of a SPWA). I actually manually paused this recording many times while nothing was visually updating... the actual elapsed time was about 20 minutes!
