Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does anyone has examples where promoting and double checking is faster than doing it on your own? Is it faster when exploring new solutions and "unknown territory" and in this case, are the answers accurate (from what I tried so far they were far off)? In that case how do you compare it with "regular search" via Google/Bing/...? Sorry for the silly question but I'm genuinely trying to understand

For me a useful coding assistant would be one that looks at what I'm _doing_ and helps me complete the boring parts of the task.

The current wave of coding assistants target junior programmers who don't know how to even start approaching a task. LLMs are quite good at spitting out code that will create a widget or instantiate a client for a given API, figuring out all the parameters and all the incantations that you'd otherwise need to copy paste from a documentation. In a way they are documentation "search and digest" tools.

While that's also useful for senior developers when they need to work outside of their particular focus area, it's not that useful to help you work on a mature codebase where you have your own abstractions and all sorts of custom things that have good reasons to be there but are project specific.

Sure, we could eventually have LLMs that can be fine tuned to your specific projects, company or personal style.

But there is also another area where we can use intelligent assistants: editors.

Right now editors offer powerful tools to move around and replace text, often in ways that respects the syntax of the language. But it's cumbersome to use and learn, relying on key bindings or complicated "refactoring" commands.

I wish there was a way for me to have a smarter editor. Something that understands the syntax and a bit the semantics of the code but also the general intent of the local change in working on and the wider context so it can help me apply the right edits.

For example right now I'm factoring out a part of a larger function into it's own function so it can be called independently.

I know there are editor features that predate AI that can do this work but for various reasons I can't us it. For example, you may have started to do it manually because it seemed simple and then you realize you have to factor out 5 parameters and it becomes a boring exercise of copy paste. Another example is that the function extraction refactoring tool of your IDE just can't handle that case, for example: func A(a Foo) { b := a.GetBar(); Baz(b.X, b.Y, c, d) } you'd want to extract a function func _A(b Bar) { Baz(b.X.... and have A call that. In some simple cases the IDE can do that. In other you need to do it manually.

I want an editor extension that can help me with the boring parts of shuffling parameters around, moving them in structures etc etc all the while I'm in control of the shape of the code but I don't have to remember the advanced editor commands but instead augment my actions with some natural language comments (written or even spoken!)