Here are some great free AI options for Vim/Neovim!

Top Free Recommendations

Neocodeium is a powerful free AI completion plugin powered by Windsurf (formerly Codeium) that works smoothly in Neovim. It provides GitHub Copilot-like autocompletion without flickering and supports repeating suggestions with the . command. Windsurf.vim (the original Codeium plugin) also works for both Vim and Neovim with free ultrafast code completion.

Avante.nvim is a popular AI assistant plugin that integrates various LLM providers and offers chat-based coding assistance. CopilotChat.nvim provides conversational AI features if you have GitHub Copilot access.

For local AI models , neollama lets you interact with Ollama models directly within Neovim, giving you complete privacy and offline capability.

The other popular FOSS option is llm.nvim from HuggingFace! llm.nvim is an open-source plugin that provides ghost-text code completion similar to Copilot. It uses the llm-ls backend and supports multiple model providers including Hugging Face Inference API, Ollama, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and TGI. The plugin automatically fits prompts within the context window using tokenizers and supports fill-in-the-middle (FIM) completion.[github]​

You can use free models from Hugging Face’s Inference API (though the free tier has rate limits), or run completely free local models via Ollama. It supports models like StarCoder, CodeLlama, and others.github+1

Quick Setup

Most plugins install easily with lazy.nvim or your preferred plugin manager. For Neocodeium, you’ll need to run :NeoCodeium auth to get your free API token. The setup is typically just a few lines of config!