Free AI coding help is easy to advertise. Hard to verify.
Landing pages show happy demos. Benchmark posts show cherry-picked wins. I don't trust any of it. I trust probes.
This week DEV is debating what the "AI" badge actually measures (good thread). Good question. My answer is boring: measure the output, not the badge. So I built a $0 smoke test. It runs in five minutes. It shows where a free model and a free server hold up — and where they break.
What I'm testing
MonkeyCode is an open-source AI coding project. At the time of writing, it advertises free model access and a free server option, including a 10M-token promo. Promos change. Check the project's current docs before you rely on the number.
