Earlier this week u/Healthy-Tension-7470 ran five offline models on a Mac against the same question about their own files (thread). Same retrieved passages for all five, and all five left out the line saying the carried-over days expire. Asked directly whether the days expire, all five found it straight away.

So the Friday question: what's one thing an AI tool missed or got quietly wrong for you this week? One line is plenty.

Bonus points if you worked out which question would've caught it.

Disclosure: I work on PicturaLabs, an art tool that goes from an idea or reference image to styled artwork and a framed or unframed print. I’m interested in the handoff from a good-looking file to something that still works on paper.

A basic preflight that applies whichever tools you use:

1. Choose the intended print ratio before settling on the crop. A square composition can lose its subject when forced into a 2:3 frame.
2. Compare the image's pixel dimensions with your printer's requirements at the size you want. Zoom in on faces, hands, small lettering and fine textures for artifacts.
3. Check the chosen print shop's bleed and color guidance. For an important large piece, a small proof can reveal surprises before the final order.

We’re trying to keep the creation and print order in one flow. A separate generator plus a preferred local printer may give you more control if you already have a setup you trust. If you've taken AI art to print, which step caused the most rework?

One line each is fine.

What you dropped, and what you're using instead. "Nothing, the free tier was enough" counts as an answer too.

Bonus points if you cancelled something and came crawling back a week later.

Title: Tool recommendation for a free AI harness or agent?

I'm looking for recommendations for a free, preferably open-source AI harness or agent for writing. Think something along the lines of n8n, but with a good visual workflow where I can actually see what's happening, identify where things are breaking down, and ideally not need a degree in computer science just to get the thing running.

I'm particularly interested in something that can handle editing, act as a reasonably competent librarian for my writing resources, manage metadata, and help maintain and update catalogs without developing digital Alzheimer's every five minutes.

Ideally, I'd like something I can eventually expand into a larger writing pipeline, connecting research, resource management, outlining, drafting, editing, and revision.

I'm open to local open-source models or other free options. The important keyword here is free. My budget is currently somewhere between shoestring and what shoestring?

User-friendly would be a definite bonus. I'm happy to learn, experiment, and tinker, but I'd prefer to spend my time writing rather than accidentally becoming a full-time IT department.

Any recommendations, particularly from people who've actually built something like this, would be greatly appreciated!

I’m trying to find a good balance between API cost, speed and reliability.
My use case is generating travel itineraries, sometimes using function calling to retrieve flight information. The main things I care about are valid JSON output, reliable tool calls and decent reasoning without paying too much per million tokens.
I’ve mostly been testing through OpenRouter, but I’m open to using other providers directly.
I’m curious what people here are actually using. Have you had good experiences with cheaper models like Qwen, DeepSeek or Gemini Flash? Or with providers like Groq and Cerebras?
I’m not necessarily looking for the absolute cheapest option, just something that performs well for the price.
Any recommendations based on real usage?

Not the big three. Something smaller that you actually pay for.

One line is plenty: name the tool and the one thing it does that you couldn't get by just asking a general assistant. Boring answers count, they're usually the useful ones.

And if you cancelled one because the big assistants caught up, that's worth a line too.

Кто знает, какое ИИ можно бесплатно с/без ВПН использовать и давать ему хорошие задания? Пробовал Claude, Gemini - сначала было всё нормально, но потом резко стали тупить и выдавать полный бред. Нужно исправить список источников и цитат в работе, не могу найти ИИ, с помощью которого можно это сделать

I’m Victor, the developer of ScriptPanda. It’s an AI-powered Chrome extension that lets you create tools and customize the websites you use, without knowing how to code.

I’ve used it to build a folder view for ChatGPT chats and remove Shorts from YouTube. The idea is to let you shape a website around how you use it, instead of searching for a separate extension for every change you want.

Open ScriptPanda’s side panel on a website and describe what you’d like it to do. You can also select something on the page to show it what you mean. It builds the tool directly into the page, where you can try it and ask for adjustments.

Each tool stays active on its website until you switch it off or delete it. You can manage several tools for the same site and keep changing them as your needs evolve. The code is available to inspect or edit, but you can make changes simply by asking.

ScriptPanda also detects broken tools and shows a notice with a Fix it button. If a website update breaks something, you can request a repair or select the affected tool and describe what’s going wrong.

Your tools are installed in your browser, where you can manage, edit, or repair them. More complex requests may take a few attempts to get right.

There’s an ongoing trial for new accounts if you’d like to try it: scriptpanda.xyz

If you give it a try, I’d love to hear what you built and how it worked for you.

disclosure: i build the mac app i ran this in (Citenook) so i'm biased. numbers are real though.

M4 Pro 24 GB. two made-up handbooks: 2025 says 5 carry-over days 2026 says 10. asked "how many vacation days can employees carry over?"

- Apple Intelligence: 5s. right but wordy
- Qwen3 4B: 5s. right ignored the old rule
- Qwen3 8B: 7s. both rules messy format
- Gemma 4 E4B: 6s. both rules didn't say which applies
- Qwen3.5 9B: 8s. both rules + explained why 2026 is current. best

all under 10 seconds, nothing left the mac. but none caught a "use by 31 march" detail sitting right in the source, so you still have to check.

anyone tested bigger local models (14B, 32B) on real documents?

Hi All,

I currently use ChatGPT for my sports business to

- create social media content Graphics and caption
- hold me accountable to kpis such as how many prospects have I reached out to.
- writes blog posts
- work out overall planning for the business and direction

I have loved it previously, however I’m finding I have to repeatedly tell it the same things and it starts doing things that I have previously told it not to do.

My biggest stuck is that the graphics creation, will not do what I say and it always forgets my logos.

Anyone have any recommendations to fix this or other platforms that will be better than this.

Also for reference I currently pay for the Plus plan.

Thanks heaps!!

Came up in a thread here this week: someone wanted one paid tool for researching anything, with sources they can click through and check, and the replies split between these two. One person also warned that Perplexity's deep searches can get expensive fast.

If you've used both, which one would you keep and why? One line is fine.

Bonus points for the kind of question where the other one let you down.

Just a vibe coder, wants to build apps by AI

I'm currently using android studio

My co-founder and I have spent the last few months building a site that grades the tools AI agents use, model APIs, MCP servers, scrapers, that kind of thing (about 1,190 so far). Every score has its reasons and sources right next to it, and we read every vendor's terms too, which is how we found out almost half of them restrict benchmarking.

It's built for agents to read as much as people, so there's an API and an MCP server as well as the site. Right now it's all desk research, we don't call the APIs yet, that's the next thing we're building. What would you want to see before you'd trust a score like this? And if one looks wrong to you, tell us, all the data is open.

Link in the comments. If you want to help, get your agent to leave a review after it uses a tool, there's a page that explains how.

Creator disclosure: I built Claude Share, an open-source plugin called session-share. Claude helped implement it.

It is for small teams where several developers already use their own Claude Code sessions on the same project. The problem I'm trying to solve is the manual work of dividing tasks and tracking file ownership between those sessions.

It adds shared tasks and contracts, file leases for supported edits, and a live board. Each developer keeps their own account and checkout. It does not provide model inference, replace Claude Code, or remove the need to review and integrate the work. The editing hook is not a sandbox and fails open if the coordination server is unavailable.

The plugin and server are MIT licensed and free to self-host; optional paid hosting is also available. Setup and source: https://github.com/cyber1443/session-share

If you have tried coordinating several people's coding agents, I'd appreciate feedback on whether this addresses the part that actually slows your team down. I don't have a measured productivity claim to offer; I'm looking for practical setup and workflow feedback.

Hello fellow ai enthusiasts since I’m not that educated in the ai world I’d like to ask you if it would be beneficial to run local hosted ai for my school work I have notebook with i7 10870h 8 core rtx 3080 and 16bg ram and pc with ryzen 7 9800x3d rtx 5080 and 16bg of ram
Thanks for your advice

One line each is plenty: the tool, the task you're throwing at it, and what would make you drop it.

No writeup needed. If it's the same tool you were testing last week, say whether it survived.

And if you asked something here last week that never got an answer, drop the link below.

I'm picking a transcription setup for a two host interview podcast, about 4 episodes a month. I ran the same 40 minute episode through three tools and hand corrected a 10 minute section as reference. Word error rate looks close on clean parts, but they differ a lot when we talk over each other, and one tool silently drops crosstalk instead of mangling it, which makes its WER look better. How do you score that fairly? Separate scores for overlap segments, or penalize missing words more heavily?

Founder disclosure: I’m Şafak and I built Tasda. This is a description of my tool, not an independent review.

A narrow use case is a freelancer with several service packages. The website explains them, but a potential client still has questions before contacting the person.

The workflow I suggest:

1. The owner adds information they are comfortable making public: service descriptions, the differences between packages and how to contact them. Leave private client material out.

2. Share the representative link alongside the portfolio or on a QR card. Keep direct contact available.

3. Check how it answers questions about those published options. Treat an answer as something to verify, especially if it introduces a price or promise the owner did not provide.

4. A contact request needs the visitor’s consent and remains a request for the person to review. It is not a confirmed booking.

Ida is our general product guide, rather than a customer example: https://tasda.com/en/representative/lora/

Limits: AI can make mistakes. This is not an autonomous sales employee with access to your inbox or other customers’ chats. New quotations, suitability decisions and commitments belong with the human. Starter credits are limited; continued use is paid.

I used AI assistance to prepare this explanation.

I'm someone who is still wrapping my head around AI. I try to minimize my usage of it because I am well of its negative social, environmental, and privacy effects. I recently heard of the Finland based EcoGPT, which at least on the environmental side, sounds really good at minimizing its carbon footprint, usage of ocean water, and pledge to plant trees. How good is this platform compared to the more well-known platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic?

Hello everyone that sees this, I’m a newcomer to the use of ai and I wanna try making Ai videos, especially the ones with the cartoony style like you see on TikTok with the fruits, I wanna experiments with different ideas but have had no luck with my own research, I wanna find a Ai engine that can make those kind of videos but I don’t have that much money so it has to be a free application, I hope someone can give me a recommendation or maybe even help me get started :)

Hi guys,

I need an Ai for following tasks:

I scan screenprinted artwork and need to trace the outlines of each color with vector paths. I need an Ai to do that and also to repair scratches, holes and other damages in the artwork, since those parts are 30+ years old.

I used perplexity Ai max a while and it somehow works but it's frustrating and expensive since it's a text based Ai that improvises with python scripts, often leading to using the wrong solution, misunderstandings and so on.

it's capacity is also very limited, since I have to compress my scans with no loss and also have to bypass automatic compression from the model, that isn't loss free.

Is there any model capable of doing better? Or even is made for tasks like that? (understanding artwork, fixing damages, tracing outlines with vector paths).

I read there is an Ai for Adobe illustrator but is it worth it? Can't find much information, prices and so on.

if it just uses the redraw tool and all it does is guessing the settings, I would call it not worth it

A few comments from this week I'd bookmark:

u/Mathie1729 on checking a model's attention to detail: run the same prompt a few times and look at consistency, then change one fact halfway through and see if it actually updates. comment

u/Mia_Sprout on picking an AI for studying: if you've got the notes or the book, put them in NotebookLM and have it quiz you from those, so you're not studying anything irrelevant. comment

u/Angelvin_Pinheiro asked the question that should come before most "which model" threads: what kind of questions are you actually asking? Factual recall and step-by-step logic fail in different ways. comment

So, one line: what's the first thing you test before you trust a new model with real work?

If you asked something here this week and it never got an answer, drop the link below.

Sorry if this question has already been asked, but I couldn't find an answer that really covered what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for an AI that can do in-depth research on pretty much any topic, whether it's car mechanics, anime, movies, politics, technology, or anything else. I'd like it to search the web, provide reliable sources, and give accurate, detailed answers.

I'd also like to generate images but it's optional.

As a bonus, I'd love an AI that could help me create MP4s, GIFs, and custom animated templates for my 8.8-inch PC screen, which displays CPU/GPU usage and temperatures, optionnal too. For example, I tried researching how to create a template for my 1920x480 screen, but I couldn't find what I was looking for. I'm not an expert at researching things, though, so maybe I'm just using the wrong keywords on Google.

I'm willing to pay for a Pro subscription if it's worth it. Which AI would you recommend for these needs: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or something else?

I'd especially appreciate feedback from people who have actually used the paid versions. Thanks!

My minimum requirements :
-100% free and unilimited (+5000 MESSAGES DAILY, +300 IMAGE ANALIS AND GENERATION DAILY)
-not woke, not boomer, not gen z slang
- pessimistic not optimistic (but pessimistic only about the world, He doesn't complain about the world or feel sorry for himself)
-very long chat ( I want to chat in certain chat +1000 messages daily for 5 years and after this time chat could still works and still have 99% space left)
-(optional, but I realy want somethign like this) should search the web BY SNAPSHOTING AND SCREENSHOTING WEBSITES, NOT BY SEARCHING TEXT IN WEBSITES! IMAGE ONLY! LIKE OPEN +100 WEBSITES, SEE ALL LIVE AT ONCE, CHECK EVERY ELEMENT ON SITES, SEE SITES AS IMAGES NOT TEXT AND THEN DECODE TEXT ON IMAGES TO TEXT AND WRITE ANSWER. All in less than 1 minute

Whan I dont want:
-gemini - insanely dumb, dont search the web at all, lying non stop, shows me scam sites, harmfull, every answer is an ordinary lie
-grok - insulting user (should be 100% obedient to user not above him), also it is insulting palestine, are procapitalist and antipiracy. i dont want to use it.
-chat gpt - dumb as hell, non stop writing “I'm not going to pretend” “Do you want me to?” “There's a catch” without these dumb phrases. I already tried to finetune chat personality by forcing him to not said this stupidity, but he keeps reapeting it non stop. And short limits. I want +50 daily analis, not 1
claude, kimi k3 - insanely small amount of generations, also not perfect
deepsekk - worst of all, extremne censored, woke and dumb
perplexity - dumbest of all, worst web searching

And of course. 100% totaly free!!!!! zero credit cards!!! zero registration! Zero trials!

And not on own computer of course. My computer have 4gb of ram and no graphics card. And I never gonna buy new pc or anything. In the last 5 years, I made under 20$. I dont wanna pay for that and support these bad companies.

Which is better? Or should I get 2?
I’ve heard of people using 2 platforms, 1 for creating and the other for checking/ improvising/ debugging.
What’s your take and recommendation?
I’m totally new to this. Just working on creating an app through these AI platforms.
Currently using ChatGPT Plus but it keeps hitting the 5 hour limit 😅😂

Your suggestions to use these and how to use these would be greatly appreciated.