I’m working on a new book on Vibe Coding for people who don’t know how to code. Using LLMs to build simple programs unlocks a lot of programming ability for people who either tried and failed to learn to program or never got started. You no longer need to learn the basics of programming logic or syntax to build useful programs to solve your problems.
The current target of the book is people who don’t know how to code but are willing to learn to run and test computer programs they create through Vibe Coding.
As part of this process I’m doing some research comparing free and paid LLM models for programming use.
For each model I pasted the same prompt in and took the first result. I saved the code into a folder which already had pygame installed via pip and ran it directly.
“Please create a game for me using python and pygame. In the game the player should navigate a 2d space using the arrow keys. In this game there should be a maze like region with rocks and stalagmites. Inside the region should be chests which contain gold. The player should be able to navigate the maze and collect gold from the chests.”
Anthropic Claude Haiku 3.5 (free)
Anthropic Claude Sonnet 3.7 (paid)
Gemini 2.0 Flash (free)
Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental (paid)
ChatGPT (free)
It’s interesting to see how paid models differ from free models. But we are getting working code on the first pass from both free and paid models.
