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Aider! Use the editor of your choice and leave your coding assistant separate. Plus, it's open source and will stay like this, so no risk to see it suddenly bec
by joelthelion 1y ago
Aider! Use the editor of your choice and leave your coding assistant separate. Plus, it's open source and will stay like this, so no risk to see it suddenly become expensive or dissappear.
- mbanerjeepalmer 1y agoI used to be religiously pro-Aider. But after a while those little frictions flicking backwards and forwards between the terminal and VS Code, and adding and dropping from the context myself, have worn down my appetite to use it. The `--watch` mode is a neat solution but harms performance. The LLM gets distracted by deleting its own comment. Roo is less solid but better-integrated. Hopefully I'll switch back soon.
- fragmede 1y agoI suspect that if you're a vim user those friction points are a bit different. For me, Aider's git auto commit and /undo command are what sells it for me at this current junction of technology. OpenHands looks promising, though rather complex.
- movq 1y agoThe (relative) simplicity is what sells aider for me (it also helps that I use neovim in tmux). It was easy to figure out exactly what it's sending to the LLM, and I like that it does one thing at a time. I want to babysit my LLMs and those "agentic" tools that go off and do dozens of things in a loop make me feel out of control.
- ayewo 1y agoI like your framing about “feeling out of control”. For the occasional frontend task, I don’t mind being out of control when using agentic tools. I guess this is the origin of Karpathy’s vibe coding moniker: you surrender to the LLM’s coding decisions. For backend tasks, which is my bread and butter, I certainly want to know what it’s sending to the LLM so it’s just easier to use the chat interface directly. This way I am fully in control. I can cherry pick the good bits out of whatever the LLM suggests or redo my prompt to get better suggestions.
- fragmede 1y agoHow do get you out the "good bits" without a diff/patch file? or do you ask the LLM for that and apply it manually?
- ayewo 1y agoBasically what antirez described about 4 days ago in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43929525. So this part of my workflow is intentionally fairly labor intensive because it involves lots of copy-pasting between my IDE and the chat interface in a browser.
- fragmede 1y agoFrom the linked comment: > Mandatory reminder that "agentic coding" works way worse than just using the LLM directly just isn't true. If everything was equal, that might possibly be true, but it turns out that system prompts are quite powerful in influencing how an LLM behaves. ChatGPT with a blank user entered system prompt behaves differently (read: poorer at coding) than one with a tuned system prompt. Aider/Copilot/Windsurf/etc all have custom system prompts that make them more powerful rather than less, compared to using a raw web browser, and also don't involve the overhead of copy pasting.
- charlie0 1y agoI like to be the human in the loop and everytime it does something I don't like, I will add a rule in conventions.md. Overtime, I watch it less and less.
- aitchnyu 1y agoYup, choose your model and pay as you go, like commodities like rice and water. The others played games with me to minimize context and use cheaper models (such as 3 modes, daily credits etc, using most expensive model etc). Also the --watch mode is the most productive interface of using your editor, no need of extra textboxes with robot faces.
- fragmede 1y agofwiw. Gemini-*, which is available in Aider, isn't Pay As You Go (payg) but post paid, which means you get a bill at the end of the month and not the OpenAI/others model of charging up credits before you can use the service.
- camkego 1y agoI guess this is a good reason to consider things like openrouter. Turns it into a prepaid service.
- Oreb 1y agoApproximately how much does it cost in practice to use Aider? My understanding is that Aider itself is free, but you have to pay per token when using an API key for your LLM of choice. I can look up for myself the prices of the various LLMs, but it doesn't help much, since I have no intuition whatsoever about how many tokens I am likely to consume. The attraction of something like Zed or Cursor for me is that I just have a fixed monthly cost to worry about. I'd love to try Aider, as I suspect it suits my style of work better, but without having any idea how much it would cost me, I'm afraid of trying.
- anotheryou 1y agoDepends entirely on the API. With deepseek: ~nothing.
- tuyguntn 1y agois deepseek fast enough for you? For me the API is very slow, sometimes unusable
- anotheryou 1y agoTo be honest I'm using windsurf with openAI/google right now and used deepseek with aider when it was still less crowded. My only problem was deepseek occasionally not answering at all, but generally it was fast (non thinking that was).
- m3adow 1y agoI'm using Gemini 2.5 Pro with Aider and Cline for work. I'd say when working for 8 full hours without any meetings or other interruptions, I'd hit around $2. In practice, I average at $0.50 and hit $1 once in the last weeks.
- beacon294 1y agoThis is very inexpensive. What is your workflow and savings techniques! I can spend $10/h or more with very short sessions and few files.
- jbellis 1y agoI love Aider, but I got frustrated with its limitations and ended up creating Brokk to solve them: https://brokk.ai/ https://brokk.ai/ Compared to Aider, Brokk - Has a GUI (I know, tough sell for Aider users but it really does help when managing complex projects) - Builds on a real static analysis engine so its equivalent to the repomap doesn't get hopelessly confused in large codebases - Has extremely useful git integration (view git log, right click to capture context into the workspace) - Is also OSS and supports BYOK I'd love to hear what you think!