Is there a completely free coding assistant agent that doesn't require you to give a credit card to use it?

I recently tried IntelliJ for Kotlin development and it wanted me to give a credit card for a 30 day trial. I just want something that scans my repo and I tell it the changes I want and it does it. If possible, it would also run the existing tests to make sure its changes don't break anything.

There are lots! Too many to cover in a single HN comment, and this space is evolving rapidly so I encourage you to look around.

While the coding assistants are pretty much universally free, you still need to connect them to a model. The model tokens generally cost something once you've gone past a certain quota.

I'm not sure if this is still true, but if you have a Google account, Gemini Code Assist had a quite generous "free tier" that I used for a while and found it do be pretty decent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47533611

It is fun to use.

Gemini Code Assist has a free tier.

You log in with your Goggle account.

Qwen code has a free tier

Opencoder is bring your own model.

You get what you pay for so good luck.