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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/

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.

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.

note: cross-posted from the other (flagged) thread on this



Aider is amazing. You can even use it in copypaste mode with web-based AI:s.




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