When I dropped my Claude sub a few months ago I first went to try pi. At first I was a little overwhelmed by having to browse extensions to get the experience I want (coupled with finding new model providers to use).
So I looked elsewhere and found Crush and Hermes. They're both very a e s t h e t i c, which I think can make using them fun, but ultimately if I had a nitpick, I would look back over at pi, and the grass looked greener. (And not to mention, both Hermes and Crush seem to have some drama/baggage.)
I'm back on pi, and happy with just a few packages I've downloaded for it.
I want to move away from claude but don't have the hardware for "good" local llms, and would rather use a ZDR api instead of one of the big apis for privacy reasons.
After my Claude subscription ended, I tried using Fireworks and OpenRouter to be less vendor-locked and access cheaper models. MiniMax, Kimi, and Qwen were the three I tried the most since they're fairly cheap, but I still burned thorugh credits way too fast. Now I'm using Codex.
I've heard that if you can deal with slower output, local LLMs can run on gaming graphics cards well enough. So they're not great for a live coding assistant, but running some tasks/agents overnight is an option.
So I looked elsewhere and found Crush and Hermes. They're both very a e s t h e t i c, which I think can make using them fun, but ultimately if I had a nitpick, I would look back over at pi, and the grass looked greener. (And not to mention, both Hermes and Crush seem to have some drama/baggage.)
I'm back on pi, and happy with just a few packages I've downloaded for it.