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Aider-AI
aider
Python2023–2026
Aider-AI / aider

aider

aider is AI pair programming in your terminal

AI & Machine LearningCommand Line
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
54Distinct people
127Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
50.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

aider is AI pair programming in your terminal

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I recommend you look at tools like Aider or Codebuff... sure they need to call some LLM at some point (could be your own, could be external), but the key thing that they are…

fullstackchris used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:24:48 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year127 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-05-10 13:12:26 UTC to 2026-07-02 12:58:15 UTC.

02040602023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 56 mentions; 5 submissions, 51 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 41 mentions; 1 submissions, 40 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 26 mentions; 2 submissions, 24 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC56551
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC41140
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC26224
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
AI Pair Programming in Your Terminal Aider lets you pair program with LLMs to start a new project or build on your existing codebase. Features Cloud and local LLMs Aider works best with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 & Chat V3, OpenAI o1, o3-mini & GPT-4o, but can connect to almost any LLM, including local models. Maps your codebase Aider makes a map of your entire codebase, which helps it work well in larger projects. 100+ code languages Aider works with most popular programming languages: python, javascript, rust, ruby, go, cpp, php, html, css, and dozens more. Git integration Aider automatically commits changes with sensible commit messages. Use familiar git tools to easily diff, manage and undo AI changes. Use in your IDE Use aider from within your favorite IDE or editor. Ask for changes by adding comments to your code and aider will get to work. Images & web pages Add images and web pages to the chat to provide visual context, screenshots, reference docs, etc. Voice-to-code Speak with aider about your code! Request new features, test cases or bug fixes using your voice and let aider implement the changes. Linting & testing Automatically lint and test your code every time aider makes changes. Aider can fix problems detected by your linters and test suites. Copy/paste to web chat Work with any LLM via its web chat interface. Aider streamlines copy/pasting code context and edits back and forth with a browser. Getting Started python -m pip install aider-install aider-install # Change directory into your codebase cd /to/your/project # DeepSeek aider --model deepseek --api-key deepseek=<key> # Claude 3.7 Sonnet aider --model sonnet --api-key anthropic=<key> # o3-mini aider --model o3-mini --api-key openai=<key> See the installation instructions and usage documentation for more details. More Information Documentation Installation Guide Usage Guide Tutorial Videos Connecting to LLMs Configuration Options Troubleshooting FAQ Community & Resources LLM Leaderboards GitHub Repository Discord Community Release notes Blog Kind Words From Users "My life has changed... Aider... It's going to rock your world." — Eric S. Raymond on X "The best free open source AI coding assistant." — IndyDevDan on YouTube "The best AI coding assistant so far." — Matthew Berman on YouTube "Aider ... has easily quadrupled my coding productivity." — SOLAR_FIELDS on Hacker News "It's a cool workflow... Aider's ergonomics are perfect for me." — qup on Hacker News "It's really like having your senior developer live right in your Git repo - truly amazing!" — rappster on GitHub "What an amazing tool. It's incredible." — valyagolev on GitHub "Aider is such an astounding thing!" — cgrothaus on GitHub "It was WAY faster than I would be getting off the ground and making the first few working versions." — Daniel Feldman on X "THANK YOU for Aider! It really feels like a glimpse into the future of coding." — derwiki on Hacker News "It's just amazing. It is freeing me to do things I felt were out my comfort zone before." — Dougie on Discord "This project is stellar." — funkytaco on GitHub "Amazing project, definitely the best AI coding assistant I've used." — joshuavial on GitHub "I absolutely love using Aider ... It makes software development feel so much lighter as an experience." — principalideal0 on Discord "I have been recovering from ... surgeries ... aider ... has allowed me to continue productivity." — codeninja on Reddit "I am an aider addict. I'm getting so much more work done, but in less time." — dandandan on Discord "Aider... blows everything else out of the water hands down, there's no competition whatsoever." — SystemSculpt on Discord "Aider is amazing, coupled with Sonnet 3.5 it's quite mind blowing." — Josh Dingus on Discord "Hands down, this is the best AI coding assistant tool so far." — IndyDevDan on YouTube "[Aider] changed my daily coding workflows. It's mind-blowing how ...(it)... can change your life." — maledorak on Discord "Best agent for actual dev work in existing codebases." — Nick Dobos on X "One of my favorite pieces of software. Blazing trails on new paradigms!" — Chris Wall on X "Aider has been revolutionary for me and my work." — Starry Hope on X "Try aider! One of the best ways to vibe code." — Chris Wall on X "Freaking love Aider." — hztar on Hacker News "Aider is hands down the best. And it's free and opensource." — AriyaSavakaLurker on Reddit "Aider is also my best friend." — jzn21 on Reddit "Try Aider, it's worth it." — jorgejhms on Reddit "I like aider :)" — Chenwei Cui on X "Aider is the precision tool of LLM code gen... Minimal, thoughtful and capable of surgical changes ... while keeping the developer in control." — Reilly Sweetland on X "Cannot believe aider vibe coded a 650 LOC feature across service and cli today in 1 shot." - autopoietist on Discord "Oh no the secret is out! Yes, Aider is the best coding tool around. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone." — Joshua D Vander Hook on X "thanks to aider, i have started and finished three personal projects within the last two days" — joseph stalzyn on X "Been using aider as my daily driver for over a year ... I absolutely love the tool, like beyond words." — koleok on Discord "Aider ... is the tool to benchmark against." — BeetleB on Hacker News "aider is really cool" — kache on X
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

56 sources
anotherpaulg·Dec 10, 2023
Nice, thanks for checking out grep-ast. The command line tool is a thin wrapper around the `TreeContext` class, whose purpose is show you a set of "lines of interest" in the context of the entire AST. This all exists because my other project aider [0] uses TreeContext to display a repository map [1] so that GPT-4 can understand how the most important classes, methods, functions, etc fit into the entire code base of a git repository. But it was easy to make a CLI interface to grep lines of interest and display them with TreeContext, and it turned out to be quite useful. The TreeContext class is line-oriented, and is mainly interested in tracking language constructs whose scope spans multiple lines. Typically these are things like classes, methods, functions, loops, if/else constructs, etc. Given a line of interest, we look at all the multi
Read the rest
-line scopes which contain it. For each such multi-line scope, we want to display some "header" lines to provide context. In this example, the match for "two" is contained in the multi-line scopes of a method and a class. So we print their headers. $ grep-ast two example.py ⋮... │class MyClass: │ "MyClass is great" ⋮... │ def print2(self): ▶ print("two") ⋮... The trick is how to determine the header for each multi-line scope? It's not ideal to just use the first line. For example, it's nice that the header for the class included the docstring as well as the bare `class MyClass:` line. For any multi-line scope, we look at all the other AST scopes which start on the same line. We take the smallest such co-occurring scope, and declare the header to be the lines that it spans. For a simple method like `def print2(self):`, that's all that gets picked up. But a complex method like `print1()` below picks up all the lines which are part of its full function signature: $ grep-ast one example.py ⋮... │class MyClass: │ "MyClass is great" ⋮... │ def print1( │ self, │ prefix, │ suffix, │ ): ⋮... ▶ print(f"{prefix} one {suffix}") ⋮... It's a heuristic, but it seems to work well in practice. [0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider [1] https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html
In AST-grep(sg) is a CLI tool for code structural search, lint, and rewriting
anotherpaulg·Nov 16, 2023
I agree that an iterative style of coding works great with GPT. That's generally how I code as well, whether collaborating with GPT or on my own. Start with "hello project" and then incrementally add functionality and complexity. But I have to ask, how do you update your files when iterating on code within the ChatGPT web UI? Do you just copy the code from your browser and manually find and replace the old code chunks in your files? I ask because my open source coding assistant aider automates away all of that hassle. It lets GPT edit your local files directly. It does a bunch more beyond that, but just the ergonomics of letting GPT edit your files is a huge win. The coding iterations become effortless. You might want to give it a try if you're using GPT a lot for coding? You do need to provide your own OpenAI API key, so you pay them for
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token usage as opposed to the all-you-can-eat $20/month ChatGPT web UI. https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider
In Types of Conversations with Generative AI
anotherpaulg·Nov 15, 2023
I asked aider to use the new GPT-4 Turbo to: Write a bash script to check Wikipedia for all acronyms of length 1-6 to find those which aren't already in use. It did a fairly smooth job of it. See the chat transcript [0] and resulting bash script [1] with git commit history [2]. It fell into the initial trap of blocking while pre-generating long acronyms upfront. But a couple gentle requests got it to iteratively stream the acronyms. It also made the initial script without an actual call to Wikipedia. When asked, it went ahead and added the live curl calls. The resulting script correctly prints: Acronym CQK is not in use on Wikipedia. Much of the article is describing prompting to get good code. Aider certainly devotes some of its prompts to encouraging GPT-4 to be a good coder: Act as an expert software developer. Always use best prac
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tices when coding. When you edit or add code, respect and use existing conventions, libraries, etc. Always COMPLETELY IMPLEMENT the needed code. Take requests for changes to the supplied code. If the request is ambiguous, ask questions. ... Think step-by-step and explain the needed changes with a numbered list of short sentences. But most of aider's prompting is instructing GPT-4 about how to edit local files [3]. This allows aider to automatically apply the changes that GPT suggests to your local source files (and commit them to git). This requires good prompting and a flexible backend to process the GPT replies and tease out how to turn them into file edits. The author doesn't seem to directly comment about how they are taking successive versions of GPT code and putting it into local files. But reading between the lines, it sounds like maybe via copy & pasting? I guess that might work ok for a toy problem like this, but enabling GPT to directly edit existing (larger) files is pretty compelling for accomplishing larger projects. [0] https://aider.chat/share/?mdurl=https://gist.github.com/paul... [1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/tla/blob/main/tla.sh [2] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/tla/commits/main/tla.sh [3] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider/blob/f6aa09ca858c4c82...
In Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym
anotherpaulg·Nov 9, 2023
Aider has had an Exercism benchmarking suite for quite some time. Interestingly, my benchmark results of GPT 4 Turbo show an opposite result: the new gpt-4-1106-preview did significantly better on the first try than the March and June models. https://aider.chat/docs/benchmarks-1106.html Aider benchmarks against the 133 Exercism python exercises, not js exercises that mentat's benchmark uses. So this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to expect qualitatively different results. I also notice that the instructions prompt that mentat uses seems to be inspired by the aider benchmark? Glad to see others adopting similar benchmarking approaches. https://github.com/AbanteAI/mentat/blob/main/tests/benchmark... https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider/blob/main/benchmark/p... Edit: Not sure if the ment
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at authors are in this thread? After looking around a bit, there seems to be a bunch of aider code in your repo. Some attribution would be appreciated. It might even be required under aider's Apache 2.0 license?
In Benchmarking GPT-4 Turbo – A Cautionary Tale
anotherpaulg·Nov 7, 2023
Related to the OpenAI announcement, I've been able to generate some preliminary code editing evaluations of the new GPT models. OpenAI is enforcing very low rate limits on the new GPT-4 model. I will update the results as quickly my rate limit allows. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38172621 Also, aider now supports these new models, including `gpt-4-1106-preview` with the massive 128k context window. https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider/releases/tag/v0.17.0
In New models and developer products
anotherpaulg·Nov 6, 2023
My open source ai coding tool aider is unique in that it is designed to work with existing code bases. You can jump into an existing git repo and start aaking for changes, new features, etc. https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider It helps gpt understand larger code bases by building a "repository map" based on analyzing the abstract syntax tree of all the code in the repo. This is all built using tree-sitter, the same tooling which powers code search and navigation on GitHub and in many popular IDEs. https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html
In New models and developer products

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