Beginner asks for free or open-source AI agents and frameworks on a limited budget
A newcomer asks for reliable free or open-source agents and coding frameworks since commercial tools burn tokens fast. Advice from the community: run an open-source harness locally (OpenClaw, Cline, Aider) with a cheap or local model, prototype on free models first, and only pay for the steps that truly need a frontier model — vague prompts, not models, are the usual budget killer.