There are plenty of free models available; many that rival their paid counterparts.

A kid interested in trying stuff can use Qwen Coder for free [1].

If the kid's school has Apple Silicon Macs (or iPads), this fall, each one of them will have Apple's 3 billion parameter Foundation Models available to them for free [2].

Swift Playground [3] is a free download; Apple has an entire curriculum for schools. I would expect an upgrade to incorporate access to the on-board LLM

[1]: https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3-coder:free

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/286

[3]: https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/

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yoz-y 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I guess hardware being able to run a local model will eventually get cheap enough, but for a lot of people even buying an Apple device or something with a good enough GPU is prohibitive.

	▲	PeterStuer 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		True, it will get cheap to run today's frontier models. But, by that time, how much more advanced will the frontier models of that time be. It is a real question. It all depends on whether the AI future is linear or exponential.
	▲	hadlock 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think we are already there. You can run a pretty ok LLM on a 4gb raspberry pi that will write most any simple 20-150 line bash script today, or toy application in python/rust. Old laptops pulled out of the trash are probably capable of running smaller LLMs and can explain how functions work. They're no claude code but you probably want a rough-around-the-edges LLM that can't do everything for you, if you're planning on using it to learn to code.

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andai 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Speaking of free models on OpenRouter, DeepSeek R1 0528 is also available for free.

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528:free

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socalgal2 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Swift and swift playground might be a good introduction to programming, but it feels likely not to lead to as many opportunities as a more popular system. And I don’t just mean job opportunities.