slinkp blog

A couple weeks ago, I temporarily switched to using GPT-5 as my exclusive coding assistant model, via Cursor. This was prompted by two developments:

First of all, I was curious to try GPT-5, which had some buzz as a new contender the latest state of the art coding model. But …

TL;DR Inexpensive, fast, promising but hit some walls; needs a lot of babysitting¶

Running it:

aider --model openrouter/moonshotai/kimi-k2

What's good about Kimi K2¶

Once I got into a groove with it, it did some things well:

• Made frontend changes very quickly and cheaply
• Did a decent job …

TL;DR Cheap, sometimes slow, unreliable as editor; sometimes wrote good code with bad characters¶

Using it:

aider  --model openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528

I didn't use Deepseek very long - just part of a day on two occasions- and didn't keep very detailed notes. It was kind of slow and made too …

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 …

Some rough impression after programming mainly with Aider. I first used it exclusively for about 4 days back in March, using version 0.77 and mostly using Claude Sonnet 3.7. More recently I've been using it . and then again for a week end of July, using 0.80.2 …

I haven't done anything fancy with integrating AI tools into Emacs, but after playing with Copilot a bit in VSCode, I decided that I wanted to at least get the most basic autocomplete feature working.

All I did was install copilot.el in Emacs, and now I can use it …