Aider Blog

Some hints for people stuck like this:

Consider using Aider. It's a great tool and cheaper to use than Code.

Look at Aiders LLM leaderboard to figure out which LLMs to use.

Use its architect mode (although you can get quite fast without it - I personally haven't needed it).

Work incrementally.

I use at least 3 branches. My main one, a dev one and a debug one. I develop on dev. When I encounter a bug I switch to debug. The reason is it can produce a lot of code to fix a bug. It will write some code to fix it. That won't work. It will try again and write even more code. Repeat until fixed. But in the end I only needed a small subset of the new code. So you then revert all the changes and have it fix it again telling it the correct fix.

Don't debug on your dev branch.

Aider's auto committing is scary but really handy.

Limit your context to 25k.

Only add files that you think are necessary.

Combining the two: Don't have large files.

Add a Readme.md file. It will then update the file as it makes code changes. This can give you a glimpse of what it's trying to do and if it writes something problematic you know it's not properly understanding your goal.

Accept that it is not you and will write code differently from you. Think of it as a moderately experienced coder who is modifying the codebase. It's not going to follow all your conventions.

https://aider.chat/

https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

I don't use it this way yet, but aider has a watch mode that would be fun with vim:

https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

I imagine with vim, from the document you're editing, you'd go:

:ter

to get a terminal. Fire up aider with --watch-files in the terminal. Hop back up to the file and start telling it what to do. Hit L when it's done to see the changes.

That's just a guess but after writing it out I kinda want to try it.

When I use aider it's via its chat interface and then I load the file with vim in another terminal tab to follow along but I think --watch-files with vim would be fun.

I don't understand the appeal of investing in leaning and adapting your workflow to use an AI tool that is so tightly coupled to a single LLM provider, when there are other great AI tools available that are not locked to a single LLM provider. I would guess aider is the closest thing to claude code, but you can use pretty much any LLM.

The LLM field is moving so fast that what is the leading frontier model today, may not be the same tomorrow.

Pricing is another important consideration. https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

Aider has a configuration for each supported LLM to define the best diff format for each; so for certain ones they're best at diff format, Gemini is best at a fenced-diff format, Qwen3 is best at whole file editing, etc. Aider itself examines the diff and re-runs the request when the request when the response doesn't adhere to the corresponding diff format.

Edit: Also the Aider leaderboards show the success rate for diff adherence separately, it's quite useful [1]

1 - https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

Vibe-wise, it seems like progress is slowing down and recent models aren't substantially better than their predecessors. But it would be interesting to take a well-trusted benchmark and plot max_performance_until_date(foreach month). (Too bad aider changed recently and there aren't many older models; https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/by-release-date.html has not been updated in a while with newer stuff, and the new benchmark doesn't have the classic models such as 3.5, 3.5 turbo, 4, claude 3 opus)

I think Auto-GPT or a similar project did something like this in 2023.

Aider has an option where you can combine different models, so one does the thinking and one implements the changes.

https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

e.g. o3 (high) + 4.1

There used to be more such combinations in this list but it seems they were removed. A while ago I think the best thing on the list was such a hybrid.