aider

Aider brings the power of AI pair programming into your familiar terminal environment, enabling seamless collaboration with large language models (LLMs) directly within your codebase. Whether you're initiating a new project or enhancing an extensive existing one, Aider integrates intelligent assistance into your daily development workflow, helping you write and edit code more efficiently and effectively.

Key Features

Aider is built to enhance your coding process with powerful, integrated features:

• 🌍 Flexible LLM Connectivity: Connect to a wide range of LLMs, including leading cloud models like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o, as well as local models. This flexibility allows you to choose the best model for your needs based on performance, cost, or privacy preferences.

• 🗺️ Intelligent Codebase Mapping: Aider builds and utilizes a map of your entire codebase. This crucial feature provides the LLM with context about your project's structure, enabling it to work effectively and accurately even within large and complex repositories.

• 🔄 Tight Git Integration: Manage AI-generated changes effortlessly. Aider automatically commits changes with descriptive messages, allowing you to use standard Git tools to review, diff, and undo any modifications made by the AI.

• ✍️ In-IDE Collaboration: Stay in your preferred development environment. Interact with Aider by adding comments directly within your code files, and Aider will process these requests, delivering changes right where you need them.

• ✅ Automated Linting & Testing: Improve code quality proactively. Aider can automatically run your linters and test suites after making changes and can even attempt to fix issues detected, streamlining your code review and quality assurance processes.

• 🗣️ Voice and Visual Context: Enhance communication and understanding. You can speak with Aider to request changes or bug fixes, and provide visual context by including images and web pages in the chat, useful for referencing documentation or UI elements.

How Aider Solves Your Problems

Aider is designed to tackle common development challenges by putting AI assistance at your fingertips:

• Boosting Productivity on Existing Codebases: Navigating and modifying large, unfamiliar projects can be time-consuming. Aider's codebase mapping helps the AI understand the project context, allowing it to propose and implement changes accurately across multiple files, significantly accelerating development in established repositories.

• Streamlining Code Quality and Refactoring: Instead of manually fixing linting errors or debugging failed tests, Aider can automate these tasks. Integrate your existing tools, and Aider can identify and propose fixes, freeing you to focus on more complex logic and feature development.

• Simplifying Complex Changes and Code Exploration: Use Aider to understand sections of code, generate documentation, or even script multi-file changes. Its ability to process context from diffs (like PR reviews) or external documents means you can leverage the AI for tasks beyond simple code generation, such as analyzing proposed changes or summarizing code history.

Why Choose Aider?

Aider stands out by providing deep, practical integration of AI into a developer's core workflow:

• Terminal-Native Efficiency: Unlike web-based or separate applications, Aider lives in your terminal, integrating directly with your local files and Git repository for a fluid, command-line-centric experience.

• Proven Capability on Real-World Code: Aider is not just for generating snippets; its design, particularly the codebase mapping and robust Git integration, makes it genuinely effective for modifying and maintaining large, existing projects – a capability demonstrated by its own development process, where Aider has written a significant portion of its own code.

Conclusion

Aider provides powerful, integrated AI pair programming right where you code – in your terminal. By offering flexible LLM support, deep codebase understanding, and seamless integration with Git and your IDE, Aider empowers you to work more efficiently, maintain higher code quality, and tackle complex tasks with intelligent assistance.

Ready to transform your coding workflow? Explore the documentation to learn more about how Aider can help you build and maintain your projects.

FAQ

• Can I add all files in my repository to the chat? While technically possible, adding every file is generally not recommended. Aider already builds a compact map of your entire repository to provide necessary context to the LLM. Adding irrelevant files can overwhelm the model, leading to poorer results and increased token costs. It's usually best to add only the specific files you intend for Aider to modify for the current task.

• How well does Aider work in large or monorepos? Aider is designed to work in repositories of any size, including large monorepos, thanks to its codebase mapping feature. For very large repos, you can improve performance by using the --subtree-only option to focus on a specific directory or by creating a .aiderignore file (similar to .gitignore) to exclude irrelevant parts of the codebase.

• How can I provide recent Git history as context? You can include recent changes in the chat context when starting a new Aider session using the /run command with git diff. For example, /run git diff HEAD~3 will include the diff from the last three commits in the chat history, providing the LLM with insight into recent development activity. You can also use this for reviewing specific branches or external diff files.