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I'm impressed by how many people who are working with Claude Code seem to have never heard of its open source inspiration, aider: https://aider.chat/ https://ai

I'm impressed by how many people who are working with Claude Code seem to have never heard of its open source inspiration, aider: https://aider.chat/ https://aider.chat/ It's exactly what Yegge describes. It runs in the terminal, offering a retro vision of the most futuristic thing you can possibly be doing today. But that's been true since the command line was born. But it's more than Claude Code, in that it's backend LLM agnostic. Although sonnet 3.7 with thinking _is_ killing the competition, you're not limited to it, and switching to another model or API provider is trivial, and something you might do many times a day even in your pursuit of code that vibes. I've been a vim and emacs person. But now I'm neither. I never open an editor except in total desperation. I'm an aider person now. Just as overwhelmingly addicted to it as Yegge is to Claude Code. May the future tooling we use be open source and ever more powerful. edit: Another major benefit of aider is its deep integration with git. It's not "LLM plus coding" it's really like an interface between any LLM (or LLMs), git, and your computer. When things go wrong, I git branch, reset to a working commit, and continue exploring.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
Do you happen to know how they compare in actual usage? Steve Yegge is gushing proudly, so it makes me wonder if, while of course aider and CC are of the same rough variety of tool, Claude Code is way better at something, or a little better at a few things, or something that's causing him to be so excited, and makes me wonder if aider is quite "up there" with Claude Code at doing those things. I guess what I'm saying is, if Steve Yegge tried aider would he gush about it the same way?
ookblah 2y ago
maybe my settings were off but i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff compared to just chat. actually turned me off to CLI based style code assistants. claude code blew my mind, however. really great for refactoring existing stuff with a proper CLAUDE.md file or one-shotting small features. i mainly use it for scaffolding, sounding board and refactoring but it's been a game changer (albeit more expensive). still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo.
- skerit 2y ago
  > i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff I had very similar results. I discovered Aider & Claude-code at the same time. I even tried Aider with Claude 3.7 (with thinking), and it just wasn't as good. I think it's a lot more annoying to use and set up, a bit more conservative in how it tries to understand your project, where claude-code has no problems scanning your entire codebase. > still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo Same. When an LLM generates code in a simple chat, it's always a bit more abstract, which is a good thing. Some of the things claude-code generated turned out to be garbage.
  - inciampati 2y ago
    Aider does scan your entire codebase. What did you try to do that didn't work? A typical workflow for me involves developing a plan document using copy/paste from the command line into a (cheap/fixed cost) webui and discussing it with the AI. Then, the result gets pasted back into aider to implement the changes in code. Aider, for me, mostly replaces the text editor, and the mindless process of squashing compilation and test bugs.
j45 2y ago
Aider seems to have fed or inspired a lot of the coding tools out there with some of Aider's breakthroughs.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago

Do you happen to know how they compare in actual usage? Steve Yegge is gushing proudly, so it makes me wonder if, while of course aider and CC are of the same rough variety of tool, Claude Code is way better at something, or a little better at a few things, or something that's causing him to be so excited, and makes me wonder if aider is quite "up there" with Claude Code at doing those things. I guess what I'm saying is, if Steve Yegge tried aider would he gush about it the same way?

ookblah 2y ago

maybe my settings were off but i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff compared to just chat. actually turned me off to CLI based style code assistants. claude code blew my mind, however. really great for refactoring existing stuff with a proper CLAUDE.md file or one-shotting small features. i mainly use it for scaffolding, sounding board and refactoring but it's been a game changer (albeit more expensive). still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo.

skerit 2y ago
> i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff I had very similar results. I discovered Aider & Claude-code at the same time. I even tried Aider with Claude 3.7 (with thinking), and it just wasn't as good. I think it's a lot more annoying to use and set up, a bit more conservative in how it tries to understand your project, where claude-code has no problems scanning your entire codebase. > still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo Same. When an LLM generates code in a simple chat, it's always a bit more abstract, which is a good thing. Some of the things claude-code generated turned out to be garbage.
- inciampati 2y ago
  Aider does scan your entire codebase. What did you try to do that didn't work? A typical workflow for me involves developing a plan document using copy/paste from the command line into a (cheap/fixed cost) webui and discussing it with the AI. Then, the result gets pasted back into aider to implement the changes in code. Aider, for me, mostly replaces the text editor, and the mindless process of squashing compilation and test bugs.

j45 2y ago

Aider seems to have fed or inspired a lot of the coding tools out there with some of Aider's breakthroughs.