Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

I'm interested in this and will probably set it up but I wish more AI tools were better integrated to my IDE. I know GH Copilot is and other big AI tools have plugins with chat/edit features but most of the cool open source doesn't seem to support IDEA/JetBrains.

I see the power of LLMs. I use GH Copilot, I use ChatGPT, but I crave deeper integration in my existing toolset. I need to force myself to try in-IDE Copilot Chat. My habit is to go to ChatGPT for anything of that nature and I'm not sure why that is. Sometimes it's the same way I break down my search to for things "I know I can find" then put together the results. In the same way I break down the problem into small pieces and have ChatGPT write them individually or somethings additively.

I didn't get time to test it beyond installing it on VSCode today, but take a look at https://GitHub.com/continuedev/continue, Apache 2.0 license, and they have an IDEA/Jetbrains plugin. Plus codebase context, full configurability to use local or remote LLMs.

I probably need to give it another try but I tried that before with my own GPT-4 key, a local model, and their models and just got errors last time I tried it. I hope that was just a temp issue but because of that I moved on. Also I've tried Cody Pro (again, weird errors and when it did work I felt like Copilot would have done better).

Folks have developed VSCode and NeoVim integrations for aider. They're based on forks of aider, so I'm not sure how carefully their authors are keeping them up to date with aider releases.

The aider install instructions has more info:

https://aider.chat/docs/install.html#add-aider-to-your-edito...

Aider works a little different where it doesn't just code complete or focus on a function level. It can solve much bigger problems.

I've been using https://cursor.sh/ heavily for about 2 months and I'm pretty happy.

Cursor is a fork of VSCode focused on AI. I'd prefer to use something totally open-source, but Cursor is free, gets regular updates, and I can use my OpenAI API key.

The diff view works well with AI coding assistants. I end up parallelizing more. I let cursor do its thing while I'm already looking at the next file.

I love aider too! Have used it to automate things such as maintaining a translated version of the page in a git pre-commit hook.

What would be since is a single plugin that focuses only on UX and allows plug an play for AI models. I think we would benefit immensely from such a concept.

In my experience, Supermaven makes Copilot look like a joke, and they’ve just released a Jetbrains plugin. YMMV. It’s just code suggestions though, no chat box.

Have you compared it to Sourcegraph Cody which also has a Jetbrains plugin? Same monthly cost as Supermaven.

I’ve tried Cody Pro. I canceled my subscription in 3 days. The plugin (for JetBrains at least) gave auth and other errors regularly and when it did work its completions were “meh” at best.

I’ll admit some of that might be from me being used to what I get from GH Copilot but basic stuff like initializing a variable called “count” with `0` or “++”-ing it in a loop were both things it didn’t auto-complete. I switched back to Copilot and it did exactly what I expected.

The polish is lacking with Cody and the errors are completely unacceptable in a paid product. I’ve seen 2 Copilot outages the entire time I’ve been using it (since before GA) so to have Cody barf up stupid errors multiple times in a 3-day period is just ridiculous.

I’ll be trying this today, thank you for the suggestion. 300K context window is awesome.

I actually like completions more, it feels more natural. I’m fine to go to ChatGPT/Opus to chat if needed.

How did you get on?