This week I experimented with building a simple planner/reviewer “agentic” iterative pipeline to automate an analysis workflow.
It was effectively me dipping my toes into this field, and I am so floored to learn more. But I’m unsure of where to start, since everything seems so fast paced.
I’m also unsure of how to experiment, since APIs rack up fees pretty quickly. Maybe local models?
There are a number of free and cheap LLM options to experiment with. Google offers a decent free plan for Gemini (get some extra Google accounts). Groq has a free tier including some good open weight models. There's also free endpoints on OpenRouter that are limited but might be useful for long running background agents. DeepSeek v3.2, Qwen3, Kimi K2, and GLM 4.6 are all good choices for cheap and capable models.
Local models are generally not a shortcut to cheap and effective AI. It's a fun thing to explore though.
and then use your existing Anthropic plan. Otherwise yeah you'll have to start using API tokens:
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-agents-with-t...