Best Free Code & Development Tools

Cline (formerly Claude Dev) is an open-source AI coding agent that lives inside VS Code and can create/edit files, run terminal commands, use the browser, and complete complex software tasks autonomously. Supports any API-compatible LLM including Claude, GPT-4, and local models.

Aider is an open-source AI pair programming tool that runs in the terminal and connects to powerful AI models like GPT-4, Claude Opus, and Gemini to help developers write, edit, and refactor code across an entire project codebase. Unlike IDE-embedded AI tools, Aider works with git repositories directly—automatically committing changes as the AI makes them, providing full context from multiple files, and enabling the AI to edit multiple files in a coordinated way to implement complex features. Aider supports over 100 programming languages and is one of the highest-scoring tools on the SWE-bench code editing benchmark. Developers use it via natural language commands to implement features, fix bugs, write tests, and refactor code while maintaining full git history of AI-made changes.

Ollama makes it easy to run open-source large language models like Llama, Mistral, and CodeLlama locally on your computer. It handles model management, optimization, and provides a simple API, keeping all data private on your hardware.

Zed is a next-generation, high-performance code editor written in Rust. Features built-in AI coding assistance, real-time collaboration, and lightning-fast performance — even with large codebases.

Continue is an open-source AI code assistant that integrates directly into VS Code and JetBrains IDEs, providing AI-powered code completion, chat, and editing using any LLM—whether commercial APIs like OpenAI and Anthropic or self-hosted models like Ollama and LM Studio. Unlike GitHub Copilot, Continue gives developers full control over which AI model powers their assistant and allows them to configure context providers, custom slash commands, and model routing rules. Its codebase indexing feature enables the AI to answer questions about and make changes across the full project, not just the open file. Continue is particularly popular among teams and enterprises that want to keep code on-premises using self-hosted models for security and compliance reasons. The extension has over 1 million downloads from VS Code Marketplace.

Aider is an open-source command-line AI coding tool that lets you pair program with LLMs in your terminal. Works with your existing git repo and supports Claude, GPT-4, and local models.

Continue is an open-source AI coding assistant that integrates into VS Code and JetBrains. Supports any LLM provider, custom models, and slash commands for a fully customizable coding experience.

CodeGeeX is a free, multilingual AI coding assistant developed by Zhipu AI and Tsinghua University, offering AI-powered code completion, translation, explanation, and generation across 100+ programming languages including Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, and Go. Available as extensions for VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and other popular IDEs, CodeGeeX provides inline code completions, chat-based coding assistance, and a unique code translation feature that converts code between programming languages. It is trained on a massive multilingual code corpus and has been shown to outperform CodeGen and other open models on coding benchmarks. CodeGeeX is free to use without an API key for individual developers, making it one of the most accessible AI coding tools available, especially popular in Asia.

Safurai is an AI-powered coding assistant built as a VS Code extension that helps developers write, refactor, explain, and review code with an emphasis on producing secure, clean code from the start. Its AI can generate code from natural language descriptions, explain existing code in plain English, suggest refactoring improvements, and identify common security vulnerabilities like SQL injection, XSS, and insecure API handling in generated or existing code. Safurai also provides documentation generation and unit test creation capabilities. Designed as an accessible, privacy-friendly alternative to GitHub Copilot, Safurai does not store user code on its servers. It supports over 20 programming languages and is particularly valued by developers building security-sensitive applications who want AI assistance without sacrificing code quality.

Safurai is a free AI coding assistant that works as a VS Code and JetBrains plugin. It supports code generation, refactoring, documentation, and Q&A about your codebase without requiring a paid subscription.