Readit Newspanarky commented on How I code with AI on a budget/free wuu73.org/blog/aiguide1.h... · Posted by u/indigodaddy
Gemini 2.5 pro free limit is 100 requests per day.
I'm getting consistently good results with Gemini CLI and the free 100 requests per day and 6 million tokens per day.
Note that you'll need to either authorize with a Google Account or with an API key from AI Studio, just be sure the API key is from an account where billing is disabled.
Also note that there are other rate limits for tokens per request and tokens per minute on the free plan that effectively prevent you from using the whole million token context window.
It's good to exit or /clear frequently so every request doesn't resubmit your entire history as context or you'll use up the token limits long before you hit 100 requests in a day.
As a successful consultant for several decades, I played several major roles:
1. Designated Teller of Hard Truths. I operated outside each client's organizational hierarchy and internal factions. By design, I was expendable and not seen as having a particular bias or “dog in the hunt.” That made it easier to say the difficult things that needed saying. E.g. "Your product...is not good and not competitive." "Competitor X is eating your lunch because A, B, and C. You need to get your act together and admit that those are important issues."
2. Bringer of News from the Outside World. Large organizations become exceptionally insular and self-referential. Everyone inside has to speak the house jargon and more-or-less toe the company line. I could break that spell, bringing in new concepts, perspectives, language, and attitudes. Over the years as a tech analyst, I introduced object-oriented programming, CAD/CAM/CAE, distributed computing, Unix, “Big Iron Unix,” the Internet, grid and clustered computing, web services, standardization, buy-not-build strategies, Linux and open source, virtualization, automated provisioning and orchestration, cloud computing, blade servers, scale-out architectures, and DevOps. Many of these were initially unfamiliar or viewed with disbelief and hostility. I also was a conduit for shifting customer expectations and appetites, market attitudes, and cultural vibes—offering a “voice of the customer” or “voice of partners” when internal teams wouldn't otherwise get a clean, unfiltered read on what was happening in the world outside their walls.
3. Family Counselor. Surprisingly often, I told organizations what other people inside the same organization were thinking, saying, or doing (and what customers or partners thought of that). The degree of insularity, siloing, and parochialism in large organizations is hard to overstate. I was almost like a counselor, helping internal teams see, understand, and appreciate their peers, and put what they were doing into a larger perspective that would have otherwise been overlooked.
I did a lot of other things, but these were my largest, most systematic, and most recurring patterns of "adding value."
Also ...
Bringer of news from your own employees - "I had no idea we were setting prices by just adding 70% to each item's cost, regardless of competition or inventory level or a new version about to obsolete the one that already has six years of supply"
Explainer of things that should be obvious - "95% of transactions generated by Facebook ads lose money and the DC is already at capacity filling unprofitable orders, so spending even more on Facebook ads is not going to fix your cash flow problem"
Both the submission and your link took me way too long to see what's the issue here.
What were they even thinking? Don't they care about this? Is their AI generating all their charts now and they don't even bother to review it?
Since everyone assumes GPT hallucinated these charts, the truth must be that they're 100% pure, organic, unadulterated human fuckups.
panarky commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber
It surprises me that the monied elite seem to have so little awareness of what happens when they keep winning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Stein's_Law
Nobody knows when.
But it's useful to think about how.
panarky commented on Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers fortune.com/2025/08/03/ai... · Posted by u/robtherobber
Obviously I'm not talking about API keys, this is what I would recommend though: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits#free-tier
I'm talking about "logging in with a Google Account".
Your link shows the free tier gets 100 Pro requests per day.
That matches my experience with a free account. With Gemini CLI it doesn't seem to matter if I log in with a Google Account or use an API key from AI Studio with billing disabled.
Yesterday I had two coding sessions in Gemini CLI with a total of 73 requests to Pro with no rate limiting.
I can't explain why you're seeing something else, but my experience has been pretty consistent.
Maybe your usage pattern is different from mine and you're getting hit by the 5 RPM limit??
Wouldn't that logic mean any automaker advertising a "collision avoidance system" should be held liable whenever a car crashes into something?
In practice, they are not, because the fine print always clarifies that the feature works only under specific conditions and that the driver remains responsible. Tesla's Autopilot and FSD come with the same kind of disclaimers. The underlying principle is the same.
There are plenty of accurate names Tesla could have selected.
They could have named it "adaptive cruise control with assisted lane-keeping".
Instead their customers are intentionally led to believe it's as safe and autonomous as an airliner's autopilot.
Disclaimers don't compensate for a deceptive name, endless false promises and nonstop marketing hype.
My experience was that giving the LLM a very limited set of tools and no screenshots worked pretty damn well. Tbf for my use case I don't need more interactivity than navigate_to_url and click_link. Each tool returning a text version of the page and the clickable options as an array.
It is very capable of answering our basic questions. Although it is powered by gpt-5 not claude now.
I've had more success with a hierarchy of agents.
A supervisor agent stays focused on the main objective, and it has a plan to reach that objective that's revised after every turn.
The supervisor agent invokes a sub-agent to search and select promising sites, and a separate sub-sub-agent for each site in the search results.
When navigating a site that has many pages or steps, a sub-sub-sub-agent for each page or step can be useful.
The sub-sub-sub-agent has all the context for that page or step, and it returns a very short summary of the content of that page, or the action it took on that step and the result to the sub-sub-agent.
The sub-sub-agents return just the relevant details to their parent, the sub-agent.
That way the supervisor agent can continue for many turns at the top level without exhausting the context window or losing the thread and pursuing its own objective.