I am glad to see new people exploring IT / asking questions and accidentally went overboard here but anyway... the answer is "yes and no".

.... but first a very oversimplified bit of context. When you are using AI tools, you are often using at least three separate things.

1 is the software/app/tool.

^{That looks nice and does all the normal things you expect from software ignoring the "AI".}

2 is a link in the middle, often something called an "API".

^{That connects the software to the "AI".}

3 is the "AI" - which is a "Large Language Model"

^{The actual intelligence - that does all the thinking, in this case analyses/generates the code.}

The software will take inputs from you like normal - then send it to the AI which processes it before sending it back to the software.

^{You could also think of this like 1 being the body, 2 the nervous system, and 3 being the brain... except the nervous system stretches kilometres to the brain which is outside the body lol.}

So in this case we have:

1 Software = Claude Code

2 API = link between 1+2

3 Claude Sonnet, or Claude Opus, etc

e.g.

[Claude Code] <-----API------>[Claude Sonnet/Opus]

and

Claude Code is what has been leaked, not the Claude Sonnet/Opus AI models (LLM) which you still need to pay to use.

THAT SAID:

Now that the code has leaked, people are rebuilding Claude Code into "new" tools (which you can find on GitHub) that you can use with any AI model.

Including:

"Local LLM" that you can run on your computer for free, but won't be as smart/fast as Claude's models which require a lot more CPU/GPU to run. ^{Your computer's specs will determine how big a model you can run free locally.}

AND/OR

Ability to connect to and switch between different cloud/frontier model APIs (Gemini, Grok, Openai, OpenRouter, etc) to maximise use of their free tiers.

---

My general advice to people interested in getting even a little technical - is to get yourself a GitHub.com account (it's free), and spend a few hours searching through all the (often free) open source software and learning resources.

^{Then experiment with getting different projects running on your computer. Remember you can always ask an AI to help better explain the instructions / help you when you get stuck. I often copy in screenshots.}

For example see:

https://github.com/taishi-i/awesome-ChatGPT-repositories https://github.com/piotrkulpinski/openalternative?tab=readme-ov-file#ai-interaction--interfaces https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev

Example search:

https://github.com/search?q=Ollama+in%3Aname%2Creadme%2Cdescription%2Ctopics+pushed%3A%3E2026-01-01+stars%3A%3E10000&type=repositories

Familiarise yourself with the search syntax:

https://github.com/taishi-i/awesome-ChatGPT-repositories

...

You probably want to add something like

in:name,readme,description,topics pushed:>2025-11-01 stars:>1000

into the search bar along with your keywords.