I tried vibe coding for free to save $1,200 a year - and it was a total disaster

I really wanted to believe in this free AI coding tool could replace Claude Code. But it isn't ready for prime time unless you're willing to babysit.

I tried a Claude Code rival that's local, open source, and completely free - how it went

I was curious if Block's Goose agent, paired with Ollama and the Qwen3-coder model, could really replace Claude Code. Here's how it worked.
GitHub

Semantic Kernel for Java

The quickest way to get started with the basics is to get an API key from either OpenAI or Azure OpenAI and to run one of the Java console applications/scripts below ...