Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

I’ve used aider to understand new codebases using technologies I don’t know and it did a fantastic job; much faster than grep/find + google.

To be fair in a world of good LSP impls, grep/find are really primative tools to be using. Not saying this isn't better then a more sophisicated editor setup, just that grep and find are a _really_ low bar

When we reach that world, let me know. I'm still tripping over a "python-lsp-server was simply not implemented async so sometimes when you combine it with emacs lsp-mode it eats 100% CPU and locks your console" issue.

Aider can answer questions I can’t search for via LSP, like “what code would process the following URL” and similar.

Wait, so this is why Emacs has been locking up on me in most of my Python projects??

Not sure if that's making things "fair". Grep & find are insanely powerful when you're a CLI power user.

Nonetheless, I'm particularly curious which cases the AI tool can find things that are not easy to find via find & grep (eg: finding URLs that are created via string concatenation, those that do not appear as a string literal in the source code)

Perhaps a larger question there, what's the overall false negative rate of a tool like this? Are there places where it is particularly good and/or particularly poor?

edits: brevity & clarity

Possibly. Definitely why it has been locking up on me when I added lsp-mode.

Lsp-mode will schedule one request per keypress but then cancel that request at the next keypress. But since the python LSP server doesn't do async, it handles cancel requests by ignoring them

I evaluate a lot of code, like ten-twenty applications per year currently, terminal tooling is my goto. Mostly the basic stuff, tree, ripgrep, find, wc, jq, things like that. I also use them on top of output from static analysis tooling.

It's not as slick as SQL on a RDBMS, but very close, and integrates well into e.g. vim, so I can directly pull in output from the tools and add notes when I'm building up my reports. Finding partial URL:s, suspicious strings like API keys, SQL query concatenation and the like is usually trivial.

For me to switch to another toolset there would have to be very strong guarantees that the output is correct, deterministic and the full set of results, since this is the core basis for correctness in my risk assessments and value estimations.

If emacs hard blocks on LSP requests, that may be on emacs as well. I recomemd you try ruff-lsp, although it does not iver everything and is more for linting, it's higb quality

Personally I don't like the fragility/IDE-specificity of a lot of LSP setups.

I wish every language just came with a good ctags solution that worked with all IDEs. When this is set up properly I rarely need more power than a shortcut to look up tags.