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

Can you describe how you read in a repo any better than aider?

Aider has a few blog posts speaking to it.

I haven't yet tried incorporating tree-sitter as Aider does to load in all definitions in the repo. In Plandex, the idea is more to load in just the files are relevant to what you're building before giving a prompt. You can also load directory layouts (with file names only) with `plandex load some-dir --tree`.

I like the idea of something like `plandex load some-dir --defs` to load definitions with tree-sitter. I don't think I'd load the whole repo's defs by default like Aider does (I believe?), because that could potentially use a lot of tokens in a large repo and include a lot of irrelevant definitions. One of Plandex's goals is to give the user granular control over what's in context.

But for now if you wanted to do something where definitions across the whole repo would be helpful (vs. loading in specific files or directories) then Aider is better at that.

But.. it was said Plandex is similar or worthy of consideration next to something like Aider.. when this post is about Aider.

Understanding a codebase, along with the in/outs between the calls is pretty vital to any codebase, especially the larger a codebase gets.

I'm not attached to the way Aider or Plandex does anything, but I'm still not clear on which scenarios it's worth considering compared to Aider, or vice Versa. Aider seems pretty unique and stands alone on a number of things. I'll still install Plandex and try it out.

Without details, it's a little surprising a post like this could get upvoted so much.