After using Codex and ChatGPT 5.5 is was very, very impressed. I subscribed to the Plus model at approx. £17 a month (first month free).
It was wonderful but slow, so I turned up the wick to high performance and before I could finish the tweaks to my project, I had run out of credits! My choices were to wait a week, top up my credit or subscribe to the £100/month plan! I chose to top up by £20 and then quickly burnt through that too!
I had previously tried Claude but hit it's limit even sooner.
I bought £10 worth of credit on Deepseek and tried to integrate it into Codex, but failed. It couldn't talk to Deepseek without a bridge because Deepseek didn't understand the commands that Codex was issuing. Apparently a bridge would translate between the two. I gave up at this point, as it seemed even with a bridge I could not easily switch between Deepseek and ChatGPT.
Next I tried Google's AntiGravity, but I failed. It seems even though it said it would pass on deep thinking to Deepseek, it still used Gemini for the chat part and that quickly ran out of free credits! It looked like I would have to buy Gemini and Deepseek credits to continue.
Lastly, I tried VS Code. I installed this and then set to customising it to use Deepseek and giving it the Deepseek API key (ask ChatGPT how to set it up, it's quite simple).
And that was it. I was now using VS Code and Deepseek. I could change to Deepseek Flash or Pro and a few other models.
It is early days yet, but my £10 Deepseek credit seems to be lasting X10 longer than my £17 ChatGpt subscription plus the £20 top up.
The IDE is not as smooth as Codex. It is not as easy to use. It chose to create a folder on my Desktop rather than my user account folder. It really wanted me to use my GitHub account. It didn't have an in-app browser (at least I've not found it yet), but it seemed to work well. I used Flash for quick changes and Pro for code additions and rewites. So far I've used 10p of credits!
I can now use both Codex and VS Code on the same project but in two different IDEs. Ideally I would like to use just Codex, but it was getting too messy.
I will let you know how I get on.
But for now, I suggest you try both Codex with ChatGPT (sign up for Plus and the first month is free) and VS Code with Deepseek (buy £5 credit).
If you have any other suggestions for simple Windows 11 AI IDEs that are free or cheap, please let me know.
Steve
Postscript
It seems modifying code is really not Deepseek's forte. It has messed up some of my 'good' scripts and failed to tackle a problem (browser needing a proxy server) which Codex+ChatGPT5.5 Plus had previously easily solved by using .php.
I got this message from Cline when trying to get it to solve the issue:
Cline uses complex prompts and iterative task execution that may be challenging for less capable models. For best results, it's recommended to use Claude 4.5 Sonnet for its advanced agentic coding capabilities.
When I asked for the same code change on Codex, it just did it and it worked first time!
No comments:
Post a Comment