Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

People interested in Aider (which is an awesome tool) might also be interested in checking out my project Plandex[1]. It's terminal-based like Aider and has a somewhat comparable set of features, but is more focused on using LLMs to work on larger and more complex tasks that span many files and model responses. It also uses a git-style CLI approach with independent commands for each action vs. Aider's interactive shell.

I studied Aider's code and prompts quite a bit in the early stages of building Plandex. I'm grateful to Paul for building it and making it open source.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

This looked cool and I was excited to try it until I realized that I either need a subscription, or I need to set up a server. Why does this need a server, when Aider just works via the cli?

First I should note that while cloud will have a subscription eventually, it's free for now. There's an anonymous trial (with no email required) for up to 10 plans or 10 model responses, and then just name and email is required to continue.

I did start out with just the CLI running locally, but it reached a point where I needed a database and thus a client-server model. Plandex is designed for working on many 'plans' at different levels of the project hierarchy (some users on cloud have 50+ after using it for a week), and there's also a fair amount of concurrency, so it got to be too much for a local filesystem or even something like a local SQLite db.

Plandex also has the ability to send tasks to the background, which I think will start to play a more and more important role as models get better and more capable of running autonomously for longer periods, and I want to add sharing and collaboration features in the future as well, so all-in-all I thought a client-server model was the best base to build from.

I understand where you're coming from though. That local-only simplicity is definitely a nice aspect of Aider.

I had a second look and the server doesn't look too hard to deploy. I like that there's reasoning behind requiring it, although I suspect that SQLite is more than capable to very easily do this.

I'm trying to deploy the server right now so I can try Plandex, it would be easier if I hadn't forgotten my Postgres password...

As a tip, self-hosting would be much easier (which may be something you don't want to do) if you provided a plain Docker image, then it would just be "pull the Docker image, specify the local directory, specify the DB URL, done".

By the way, why does it need a local directory if it has a database? What's stored in the directory?