My CMPINF-2100 study group has been the best part of this semester. Not the lectures. Not the notebooks.
It’s the free stuff.
Students of any type always go for free stuff. It turns out a graduate students are no different. So this week in the middle of EDA assignment? We all logged on to Google Meet to learn about all the free stuff no one told us about. Stuff we had access to either as students of the University of Pittsburgh or as Students in general. I did my best to get the word out, get everyone equipped with AI tools and the basics to hit the ground running with the latest and the best.
Now if only OBS studio would play nice and let me run one of these study groups without a hitch…No? Ok.
Back to this absolute unit of a pile of AI tools offered by companies offered as a hand out to students for free. Tools that, in most cases goes unclaimed for exactly one reason. Nobody tells you it exists. Well they’d tell Zapp Brannigan, but who wouldn’t tell Zapp? Our student status gets us these new toys.
Only if we have the patience to fill out a form, or in one case give our location and wait three days.
I brought the list to the group. Then I promised I would write it down. So here it is, written down.
These are the tools we discussed, the requirements to secure them, and where to get them.
GitHub Copilot (★★☆☆☆)
- Apply at github.com/settings/education/benefits
- Student email
- Proof of enrollment
- Location for no raisin
- 3-day waiting time
Cursor / Cursor IDE(★★★★★)
- Free for a year at cursor.com/students
- Student email
- Proof of enrollment (sometimes)
- Instant
Antigravity / Antigravity IDE(★★★☆☆)
- antigravity.google/pricing
- Free tier
- Older agent models: Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6, gpt-oss-120b
- Lower weekly quota
- Google occasionally offers it free to students
Codex(★★★★☆)
- $100 of free Codex credit at developers.openai.com/community/students
- Student email
- Proof of enrollment
Ollama(★★★★☆)
- Via PowerShell:
irm https://ollama.com/install.ps1 | iex - Free
- Multiple models
None of this does the work for you. The notebook still has to run and it will get you into trouble if you don’t know what it’s writing for you. Especially Gemini and CoPilot.
Now you have been told. Go get that free stuff!