AI coding assistants are a frequent topic for InfoWorld and probably most tech publications. However, the dirty secret is that this landscape changes daily. Not long ago Claude Code practically obliterated the competition. How? Well, it wasn’t that the CLI was amazing (or Aider would have run the board a year ago). It was Anthropic’s new Claude Max pricing. $200 got you seemingly all you could eat and not just Sonnet but Opus 4, the company’s higher-end, smarter reasoning model, available through the Claude Code CLI.
The party is over next month. Anthropic just announced new weekly rate limits to go with their already de facto shrunk limits. This means that, for all of the people who have been using Claude to automatically generate code—well, suddenly it won’t be as good of a deal.
Gemini and Qwen
Meanwhile, Google launched an open-source alternative, Gemini CLI. Google’s plan seemed more generous at first, but the free tier throttles you from gemini-2.5-pro to gemini-2.5-flash rather quickly. Flash is kinda dumb, so if you were coding on pro and the tool switches to flash, you’re not going to like the result. The other option (at least at launch) was to give Google your API key, which combines a much more generous free tier and surprise billing (!). Google gonna Google. The service throws HTTP 500 errors at random and the CLI is designed to ask flash if pro should keep talking, sending your whole conversation multiple times. Because you don’t mind the token burn and latency, do you?