Dev.to
The Best Free AI Generators in 2026: 9 Tools Actually Worth Using
I build and run one of the tools on this list (AGenO — full disclosure below), and I use every other tool here regularly. This is what "free" actually gets you on each one, including the catches. The AI tool landscape has a dirty secret: almost nothing labeled "free" is free. Most tools give you a taste — ten messages, three images, one song — and then the paywall lands. So instead of another list of forty tools nobody has tried, here are nine that give you real value at $0, organized by what you're trying to make, with the actual limits spelled out. Quick comparison Tool Best for What's actually free The catch ChatGPT General chat & writing ~10 msgs/5h on the flagship model Silently switches you to a weaker model after the limit Claude Long documents, nuanced writing 10–25 msgs/5h, varies with demand Limits shrink when servers are busy Gemini Image generation & editing Generous with a Google account Best features drift to the paid tier Perplexity Research with citations Unlimited basic searches Pro searches are capped Suno AI music ~10 songs/day No commercial use on free; failed generations can eat credits Leonardo AI Stylized art & game assets Daily token allowance Confusing token system; images are public on free Character.AI Roleplay & AI characters Unlimited chat Heavy filters; your chats train their models AGenO All of it in one place Images, songs with vocals, chat, characters, stories, coding problems — daily free allowance One-person project — busy hours can mean a short queue Canva Magic tools Quick social graphics 50 text-to-image uses Design-tool add-on, not a real generator Chat and writing ChatGPT is still the default for a reason — the free tier includes the flagship model and it's good at nearly everything. The catch nobody tells you about: after roughly ten messages in five hours, it quietly downgrades you to a mini model without making it obvious. If your answers suddenly get dumber mid-conversation, that's why. Claude writes the most natural prose
Givin Yang
2026-07-04 05:23
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Dev.to
Scrape Google Trends Without an API Key (Including the Scraper Flag Google Hands You)
Google Trends has no official API, and most wrapper libraries rot within months. But the Trends site itself runs on a keyless JSON API that anyone can call, and it serves the exact numbers you see in the UI. Here is the full recipe, including one gotcha where Google quietly labels your session a scraper. The two step flow Trends works in two steps. First you call explore , which returns a list of widgets, one per chart on the page, each with a signed token: GET https://trends.google.com/trends/api/explore ?hl=en-US&tz=0 &req={"comparisonItem":[{"keyword":"web scraping","geo":"US","time":"today 12-m"}],"category":0,"property":""} Then you call a widget data endpoint with that widget's request and token : GET https://trends.google.com/trends/api/widgetdata/multiline?hl=en-US&tz=0&req=<widget.request>&token=<widget.token> The widget kinds map to endpoints: TIMESERIES uses multiline , GEO_MAP uses comparedgeo , and both RELATED_QUERIES and RELATED_TOPICS use relatedsearches . The cookie trick Call explore cold and you get a 429. The API wants a NID cookie, and here is the counterintuitive part: you get it by requesting the public explore page first, and that page may itself respond 429 while still setting the cookie you need. const res = await fetch ( ' https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=test ' ); // res.status may be 429. The Set-Cookie header is still there. const cookies = res . headers . getSetCookie (); Grab the cookie from the 429 response, retry explore , and everything works. Strip the anti JSON prefix Every Trends response starts with a junk line like )]}' to break naive JSON.parse calls. Drop everything up to the first newline: const body = await res . text (); const data = JSON . parse ( body . slice ( body . indexOf ( ' \n ' ) + 1 )); The scraper flag Here is the part I have not seen documented. Look inside the widget request object that explore returns to a keyless session: "userConfig" : { "userType" : "USER_TYPE_SCRAPER" } Google knows. And
Ken-Mutisya
2026-07-04 05:23
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Dev.to
Engineering Geofencing: Lessons in Android Battery and Location Accuracy
It happened during a quiet, solemn moment in a community prayer hall. I was sitting in the third row, reflecting, when suddenly, a high-pitched ringtone shattered the silence. It wasn't my phone, but the ripple effect of embarrassment was immediate. Everyone looked around, shifting uncomfortably. That collective tension is something we have all felt—a moment of human error that technology should have intercepted. I looked at my own device, feeling the familiar anxiety of whether I had remembered to flip the physical silent switch. It was then that I decided to stop relying on my own memory. We live in an era of hyper-connected devices, yet the most basic context-awareness—knowing where we are and how our phone should behave—remains manual. I found myself constantly toggling between 'Normal' and 'Silent' modes at the library, the office, and the gym. If I forgot, I was the person disrupting a meeting. If I remembered to mute it, I inevitably forgot to unmute it, missing urgent calls from family for hours. The existing solutions were either too bloated, requiring invasive cloud permissions, or they simply failed to trigger reliably when the screen was off. I needed a solution that was local, predictable, and battery-conscious. Building Muffle started with the realization that I had to master the GeofencingClient API without draining the user's battery. The primary challenge wasn't just triggering an event; it was doing so while the device was in a deep sleep state. I initially experimented with a standard LocationManager approach, polling GPS coordinates at set intervals. That was a disaster. It kept the radio active, pinged the GPS satellites constantly, and decimated the battery life in under four hours. It was an immediate non-starter for a production-ready application. I pivoted to the Geofencing API provided by Google Play Services, which leverages the fused location provider. This is significantly more efficient because the system handles the batching and hardwa
Haseeb
2026-07-04 05:23
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HackerNews
AI First: How the Federal Government Is Prioritizing AI over People and Planet
eatox
2026-07-04 05:21
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Dev.to
Textparser – High-performance C parsing engine using Python-compiled grammars
Hi everyone, I want to share textparser, a high-performance, lightweight text parsing and AST generation library written in pure C. 💡 The Core Idea & Why It's DifferentTraditional parser generators (like Flex/Bison) come with a steep learning curve and rigid code generation. On the other end, hand-writing recursive descent parsers or state machines becomes an unmaintainable mess as your language grows.textparser bridges this gap using a hybrid JSON + Python + C workflow:You define your tokens, syntax patterns, and color styles in a clean, human-readable JSON grammar file. A lightweight Python compiler tool processes the JSON, runs optimizations, and emits a dense, static C header array.The C runtime engine loads these pre-compiled arrays instantly. It processes raw text strings into an abstract token tree (textparser_token_item) using a highly optimized regular expression engine (crpe2).By offloading the grammar overhead and heavy state-machine parsing logic to the Python build step, the actual runtime C library stays incredibly lean, memory-efficient, and fast. 🚀 Features At A Glance30+ Languages Out-of-the-Box: Includes ready-to-use JSON grammars for C, C++, Rust, Python, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, and dozens more.Rich Token Metadata: Every parsed token tracks exact code coordinates, structural flags, and custom syntax styling options.Zero Bloat: Ideal for terminal text editors, syntax highlighters, custom linters, and lightweight static analysis tools where bringing in a massive compiler front-end is overkill.
Boris Barbulovski
2026-07-04 05:20
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TechCrunch
The only AI glossary you’ll need this year
The rise of AI has brought an avalanche of new terms and slang. Here is a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases you might encounter.
Natasha Lomas, Romain Dillet, Kyle Wiggers, Lucas Ropek
2026-07-04 05:20
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Dev.to
Chemistry Coding the SpudCell 🥔
This week, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced something that genuinely stopped me mid-scroll. A team led by Associate Professors Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart built the world's first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle — not modified from an existing organism, not borrowed from biology. Built. From. Scratch. They're calling it SpudCell . It can grow. It feeds. It copies its own genetic material. It divides into new cells. And it does all of this from a starting point of pure chemistry — non-living components assembled with intent. Adamala put it plainly: "We've replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark." — University of Minnesota That's not hype. That's a scientist who has spent her career working toward this moment, choosing her words carefully. What SpudCell Actually Is SpudCell isn't a copy of a bacterium or a stripped-down version of an existing cell. It's a chemically defined system — meaning researchers know the full ingredient list, every molecule at every concentration. To put the scale in perspective: the human genome runs about 3 billion base pairs. SpudCell's genome is 90 kilobase pairs. Minimal by design. But minimal doesn't mean simple — it means precise . Every component earns its place. — CBS Minnesota The cell mostly resembles a basic bacterium in its behavior, but it carries none of evolution's baggage. No millions of years of accumulated quirks. No legacy code. Just the essential machinery for life's core functions, assembled on purpose. Yuval Elani, a synthetic biology researcher at Imperial College London, framed it this way: "Building a cell from scratch means you are no longer tied to the constraints and evolutionary baggage of natural biology. It opens up the possibility of designing systems and programming them to do things that li
Cat Mac
2026-07-04 05:18
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Reddit r/MachineLearning
H64LM: A 249M-parameter Mixture-of-Experts Transformer built from scratch in PyTorch [P]
Hi everyone, I built H64LM, a research project to better understand modern LLMs by implementing one from scratch in PyTorch. Instead of relying on high-level training frameworks, I implemented the core components myself attention, MoE routing, normalization, and the training loop. Features 249M-parameter Transformer Grouped Query Attention (GQA) Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (8 experts, Top-2 routing) with 3 auxiliary routing losses SwiGLU, RoPE, RMSNorm Sliding-window attention Mixed-precision training, gradient accumulation Custom training loop (no Trainer abstractions) Checkpointing and resume support The included checkpoint was trained on a subset of WikiText-103 to validate the pipeline end-to-end, not to be a strong model it's visibly overfit past epoch 10 (best val PPL ~40.5). Known limitations are documented in the README, including batch-size-1-only generation and no true DDP (falls back to DataParallel). GitHub: https://github.com/Haiderkhan64/H64LM Feedback on the implementation or architecture is very welcome. submitted by /u/Loose_Literature6090 [link] [留言]
/u/Loose_Literature6090
2026-07-04 05:18
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Dev.to
Hit the Reverse Button on a Learning Vacuum Brain 💭
There's a phase almost every developer gets stuck in. You're consuming tutorials, bookmarking articles, finishing courses, and buying books you'll read "eventually." You're learning constantly — but you're not producing anything. You're just... absorbing. That's the learning vacuum. And if you've been there, you know how easy it is to confuse staying busy with making progress. At some point, the shift has to happen. You stop being a sponge and start being a signal. Here's how I started making that turn. Start a Daily or Weekly Code Journal You don't need a blog, a brand, or an audience for this. Just a file. A note. Anything. Write down what you built, what broke, and what you figured out. Even one sentence counts. I like to write a quick sentence and how many hours, just like if you were filling in an invoice for contract work. The act of putting it into words forces you to actually process what you learned instead of letting it blur into the background noise of your brain. Over time, those entries start to look like a roadmap — and you realize you've come further than you thought. Code Something You Actually Want to Build Pick something dumb. Pick something fun. A browser game, a weird UI experiment, a tool that solves exactly one tiny problem in your life. I signed up for DEV Challenges , Summer Bug Challenge and upcoming Weekend Challenge to get my ball rolling. The best projects I've ever worked on had no real-world utility. They were just interesting to me. And that interest kept me showing up even when things got hard. A tutorial can't give you that. Only a project you actually care about can. Find Your People Whether it's here or a Discord server, a local meetup, a dev community on Farcaster or Lens, or just a forum thread you keep coming back to — find somewhere to show up regularly. Lurking is fine at first. But eventually, drop a comment. Answer a question you know the answer to. Share something you built. Community is where isolated learning becomes shar
Cat Mac
2026-07-04 05:17
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HackerNews
New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview
cubefox
2026-07-04 05:16
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Dev.to
The First .com Domain Was Symbolics.com
Every business that has ever typed a web address into a browser owes a small debt to a company most people have never heard of. On March 15, 1985, a computer maker called Symbolics registered Symbolics.com and, in doing so, became the first ever holder of a .com domain name. More than forty years later that address is still registered and still resolves - making it the oldest .com domain on the internet. Who was Symbolics? Symbolics Inc. was a Massachusetts company that built specialized computers called Lisp machines - workstations designed from the silicon up to run the Lisp programming language, then the darling of artificial intelligence research. These were serious, expensive machines aimed at labs and universities, and the company sat right at the cutting edge of 1980s computing. So it was fitting, if a little accidental, that they were first in line when commercial domains became available. The domain name system itself was brand new. DNS had only been introduced in 1983 to replace the unwieldy HOSTS.TXT file that every machine on the early internet had to keep in sync. The now-familiar top-level domains - .com , .org , .net , .edu , .gov - were defined in 1984. When registration opened, .com was meant for commercial entities, and Symbolics grabbed theirs before anyone else did. A slow start for the web's most valuable real estate What is striking today is how little demand there was. In the whole of 1985, only a handful of .com domains were registered - names like BBN, Think, and a few other technology companies trickled in over the following months. There was no gold rush, because there was no web yet. Tim Berners-Lee would not propose the World Wide Web until 1989, and the first website would not appear until 1991. A domain name in 1985 was a technical convenience for reaching a machine, not a brand or a piece of property. That makes Symbolics.com a kind of time capsule. It was registered before the web, before browsers, before e-commerce, and before anyon
fluidwire
2026-07-04 05:14
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HackerNews
AI inference is obviously profitable
emirb
2026-07-04 05:14
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Product Hunt
Termi Protocol
Watch your AI coding agents build, live in 3D Discussion | Link
2026-07-04 05:14
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Dev.to
25 Years of Headaches. Zero Doctors Found the Cause. One AI Conversation Did.
A 62-year-old man in India. Kidney failure, on dialysis three times a week. Diabetes. Hypertension. A stroke six years ago. And one symptom nobody could explain: severe headaches, but only when lying down to sleep. For 25 years, specialists came up empty. Then his nephew uploaded everything into Claude. And the AI asked one question that changed everything: "Does he snore?" The answer was yes. Loudly. For 25 years. That was the clue. The sleep study confirmed severe sleep apnea: 119 breathing stops per night, oxygen dropping to 78%, 47 oxygen desaturations per hour. CPAP treatment started. Headaches gone. ( India Today , NDTV ) What Actually Happened The story was posted on Reddit's r/ClaudeAI community by user u/the_kuka in March 2026. It went viral immediately, covered by India Today, NDTV, Hindustan Times, Economic Times, and Times of India within days. Here's the timeline: 25 years of symptoms. The uncle had loud snoring, daytime exhaustion, and severe positional headaches (only when lying down). Every doctor attributed the fatigue to "dialysis fatigue" or "age." The snoring was something the family joked about. Multiple specialists, zero connections. He saw neurologists. He saw nephrologists. He had brain MRIs and blood work. Each specialist looked at their domain. Nobody stepped back and asked what connected everything. One conversation with Claude. The nephew compiled all medical records, MRI notes, and symptom history, and uploaded them. Over several days, Claude did three things: Identified the positional pattern as the key clue. Headaches triggered by lying down is not random. It points to something that happens during sleep. Pulled research showing 40-57% of dialysis patients have undiagnosed sleep apnea. This is a published statistic, not a guess. Asked about snoring. This is the question no specialist had asked in 25 years. The answer was immediate and obvious in hindsight. ( Substack - Chetan Pujari ) The sleep study confirmed it. Severe obstructive sl
Md Jamilur Rahman
2026-07-04 05:12
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HackerNews
Mistralai/Leanstral-1.5-119B-A6B
satvikpendem
2026-07-04 05:00
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HackerNews
Meta AI chief says their coming LLM has caught up with OpenAI's flagship model
maxloh
2026-07-04 05:00
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Product Hunt
ChecklistFox
AI Checklist Maker - Beautiful PDFs, Free & Instant Discussion | Link
2026-07-04 04:40
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HackerNews
Espionage Against the European Parliament
ledoge
2026-07-04 04:38
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HackerNews
Giving a domain a hill to climb: benchmarking as data activation
galsapir
2026-07-04 04:32
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HackerNews
Bought an expired startup domain: I inherited their AWS Root account
taubek
2026-07-04 04:25
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