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Free Coding Agents for CEN 5016

Last verified: August 27, 2026

This space changes fast. Several offers that blogs still recommend were discontinued earlier this year. If something below doesn't match what you see on the vendor's site, the vendor's site wins — and please let me know so I can update this page.

You do not need all of these. Pick one primary agent and set up one backup. The backup matters: free tiers throttle, and "I hit my quota" is not an extension request I can grant.

Quick comparison

Tool Cost to you Credit card? Form factor Best for
OpenAI Codex + student credits Free tier + $100 credits No CLI, IDE ext., web Recommended primary. Best free capacity for US students
GitHub Copilot Student Free w/ student verification No IDE, CLI, PR agent Completions and light agent work; also unlocks the Student Pack
Google Antigravity Free preview tier No Agent-first IDE + CLI Multi-agent workflows, browser automation
opencode Free software, bring your own key No Terminal (TUI) Recommended backup. Vendor-neutral; reuses keys/credits you already have
Cline Free software, bring your own key No VS Code extension Seeing and approving every agent action
Cursor / Devin Desktop Free tier only No IDE Trying agentic editing without commitment

Codex is included in every ChatGPT plan, including the free one, and OpenAI runs a student credit program that is the single most generous free offer currently available to US students.

What you get: Codex on the free ChatGPT tier, plus $100 (2,500 ChatGPT credits) if you verify as a student. Credits stack on top of the free tier's included usage and expire 12 months after they're granted. These are ChatGPT credits usable in Codex, not API credits.

Eligibility: Currently enrolled at a degree-granting university in the US or Canada, and residing in the US or Canada when you claim. One claim per student.

Sign up

  1. Create a ChatGPT account at chatgpt.com if you don't have one. A personal account is fine; it does not need to be your UCF account.
  2. Go to chatgpt.com/codex/students and sign in.
  3. Click Claim now to start verification.
  4. Verify through SheerID using your @ucf.edu or @knights.ucf.edu email. This is usually instant.
  5. If automatic verification fails, upload a dated student ID plus a current-semester transcript or enrollment certificate. Manual review takes a few days, so do not leave this until an assignment is due.
  6. Confirm the credits landed: check the usage page in your account. You should see 2,500 credits.

Install the CLI

npm i -g @openai/codex
codex

Sign in with your ChatGPT account when prompted. There are also IDE extensions and a web interface; the CLI is what we'll use in class.

Watch out for

The free tier cannot purchase credits, so once your grant is exhausted you wait for the reset rather than paying through. Use the smaller/faster model for routine edits to stretch your allowance — model choice makes a multiple-fold difference to how fast credits burn.

2. GitHub Copilot Student

Worth claiming regardless of what else you use, because the same application unlocks the whole GitHub Student Developer Pack.

What you get: the Copilot Student plan — unlimited code completions, plus 200 GitHub AI Credits per month for chat, agent mode, code review, and the Copilot CLI. Credits are priced at $0.01 each, so the monthly allowance is roughly $2 of metered usage.

Be realistic about this one

Since GitHub moved students to credit-based billing on June 1, 2026, students doing genuine agentic work routinely report exhausting the 200 credits in under an hour. Completions keep working after credits run out, but the agent does not. Treat Copilot as your completions tool and something else as your agent.

Also note that premium models are no longer hand-selectable on the student plan; you get Auto mode, which routes across providers for you.

Sign up

  1. Sign in to GitHub with a personal account, not a school-managed org account. Verification attaches to your individual profile.
  2. Go to education.github.com/pack and apply.
  3. Select Student as your role.
  4. Verify with your UCF email. If that doesn't clear automatically, upload dated proof of enrollment (student ID, transcript, or enrollment letter). Your GitHub profile name should match the name on your documents.
  5. Wait for approval. School-email verification is often immediate; document review can take several days, and partner benefits in the pack can take up to 72 hours to appear after approval.
  6. Confirm your plan at github.com/settings/copilot. It should say Copilot Student.
  7. Install the Copilot extension in VS Code (or your JetBrains IDE) and sign in with the same account. If it still shows Free, sign out and back in.

Copilot CLI

npm install -g @github/copilot
copilot

3. Google Antigravity

Google's agent-first IDE, built on VS Code. It runs multiple agents in parallel and includes browser automation, which makes it interesting for the testing and validation topics later in the term.

What you get: a free Individual tier with access to the supported model lineup, unlimited tab completions, and a metered agent quota that refreshes on a rolling basis.

Be realistic about this one too

Google has cut the free quota repeatedly since launch — daily free requests dropped from 250 to around 20 in March 2026 — and introduced a paid credit system for overflow. Google has not committed to a permanent free tier. Fine for coursework, not something to build a semester-long dependency on.

Sign up

  1. Go to antigravity.google and download the installer for your platform.
  2. Install and sign in with a Google account. Your UCF Google account or a personal one both work.
  3. Open a folder or clone a repo from a GitHub URL, and start prompting.

The Antigravity CLI replaced the old Gemini CLI, which stopped serving free and AI Pro users on June 18, 2026. If a tutorial tells you to install gemini-cli, it's out of date. The CLI draws from the same quota pool as the IDE.

Optional: free year of Google AI Pro

Google is offering eligible US college students 12 months of Google AI Pro free (normally $19.99/month), which raises your Gemini usage limits roughly fourfold. Redeem by December 31, 2026 via Google's student offer page, verifying through SheerID.

Read this before you claim it

A valid payment method is required at sign-up, and the plan auto-renews at $19.99/month when the year ends unless you cancel. This is entirely optional for this course. If you claim it, put the renewal date in your calendar the same day.

Open source, MIT licensed, terminal-based, and not tied to any provider. This is the one I'd point you to when a vendor changes its free tier mid-semester, because you can repoint it at whatever access you still have.

It's also the most useful one pedagogically: because you supply the model, you see directly how much of an agent's behavior comes from the harness versus the underlying model. We'll come back to that distinction.

Install

npm i -g opencode-ai@latest

Homebrew (brew install opencode), Scoop, Chocolatey, and an official desktop app are also available from opencode.ai.

Name collision warning

There are numerous forks and look-alike repositories with confusingly similar names, some of them stale or unrelated. Install from opencode.ai or github.com/sst/opencode only. This is a good habit generally: agentic tools execute code on your machine, so supply-chain hygiene is not optional.

Configure a provider

opencode auth login

Pick a provider and paste an API key. Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works. Then run opencode in your project directory.

5. Cline (VS Code)

Open source VS Code extension, bring your own key. Its distinguishing feature is that it requests approval for every file edit and every terminal command before executing.

For a course about software engineering practice, that visibility is the point. You should be able to articulate what the agent did and why, and Cline makes that hard to skip.

Install

  1. Open VS Code, go to Extensions, search Cline, install.
  2. Open the Cline panel and select a provider.
  3. Paste an API key, or point it at a local model through Ollama.

Watch out for

Cline re-sends context aggressively, so token consumption per task runs higher than other agents. Budget accordingly if you're spending metered credits.

6. Also available, with caveats

Cursor

The free year of Cursor Pro for students ended for new sign-ups on June 25, 2026. Cursor cited verification fraud. Any guide telling you to verify a .edu email for a free year is out of date. What remains is the free tier (tab completions, chat, limited agent mode) at cursor.com/download, plus credits distributed at on-campus and online events starting this fall. If you already redeemed the student year, you keep it until it expires, then it renews at $20/month unless cancelled.

Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf)

Cognition rebranded Windsurf on June 2, 2026; windsurf.com now redirects to devin.ai. Free tier gives unlimited tab completions and a light agent quota. Serviceable, not generous.

Claude Code

No student discount and no free tier; it requires a paid Claude plan or API credits. Anthropic's education product is licensed institutionally rather than sold to individuals. Don't plan around it unless that changes.

Qwen Code

Apache-2.0, the living open fork of the Gemini CLI codebase, tuned for Qwen models:

npm i -g @qwen-code/qwen-code@latest

A reasonable option if you want a polished CLI paired with open-weight models.

Local models via Ollama

Genuinely $0 end to end and fully offline. Quality on long multi-file tasks lags frontier models noticeably, and you want 32GB of RAM as a practical floor. Fine for experimentation, frustrating as your only tool.

Institutional policy — read this

UCF IT publishes guidance classifying AI tools by data classification level, and coding agents are covered explicitly. Two points that apply directly to this course:

  • GitHub Copilot CLI and VS Code agent extensions are approved for use at UCF only when signed into a UCF GitHub Enterprise organization under a Copilot Business/Enterprise license. Personal-account usage sits outside that approval.
  • DeepSeek is banned at Florida public institutions by state legislature. Do not route agent traffic through it, including indirectly via an aggregator.

The current tables are at infosec.ucf.edu/document/ai-guidance. Coursework in this class is unrestricted data, so the tools above are appropriate for our assignments, but the classification rules apply to everything else you do with these tools. If you are also working on funded research, export-controlled material, or anything with student records in it, the answer changes and you should ask before pointing an agent at it.

Do not paste unpublished research, proprietary internship code, or anyone's personal data into any of these tools.

Ground rules for this course

  1. You are responsible for every line you submit. "The agent wrote it" is not a defense for code you cannot explain, and it is not a defense for a bug.
  2. Disclose your tooling. Each submission should note which agent(s) you used and roughly how. That goes in your Collaboration Log, the same as any other AI assistant under the Policy on the Use of AI Coding Tools. This is data I actually care about, and it is not held against you.
  3. Keep your transcripts. Several assignments will ask you to reflect on where the agent helped, where it misled you, and what you had to correct. You cannot reconstruct that from memory.
  4. Set up early. Verification through SheerID can take days when automatic matching fails. Have a working agent before the first agent-based assignment, not on the morning it's due.

If you get stuck

  • Verification rejected and you're certain you're eligible: most vendors accept a dated student ID plus a current transcript as manual fallback. Make sure your account's display name matches your documents.
  • Out of quota mid-assignment: switch to your backup agent. This is why you set one up.
  • No workable option at all: contact me. Do not pay for a subscription for this course. Nothing in CEN 5016 requires a paid tool, and if you find yourself thinking it does, that's a bug in my assignment design and I want to hear about it.

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