Comment by TeMPOraL

1 month ago

I thought it's basically a subset of Aider[0] bolted into a VS Code fork, and I remain confused as to why we're talking about it so much now, when we didn't about Aider before. Some kind of startup-friendly bias? I for one would prefer OSS to succeed in this space.

--

[0] - https://aider.chat/

11 comments

TeMPOraL

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Xmd5a  1 month ago

I tried aider and had problems having it update code in existing files. Aider uses a search and replace pattern to update existing code. So you often end up with

    >>>SEARCH
        }
    >>>REPLACE
        }, {'more': 'data'}

Of course aider will try to apply this kind of patch even when the search pattern matches several occurrences in the target file. Looking at the Github issues, this is a problem that was brought up several times and was never fixed because apparently it's not even problematic. I moved to cursor, which doesn't have this problem, and never looked back.

  • ErikBjare  1 month ago

    For what it's worth, gptme will refuse non-unique matches (and ask the LLM to try again). I thought Aider did too (easy win after all), but apparently not.

    • TeMPOraL  1 month ago

      For me this happened at the end of functions in vanilla JS; I used to work around it by putting "// end of foo()" comments after the closing brace. However, Aider has multiple modes for LLM editing, including diff, udiff, and whole file; you can switch between those when needed.

tailspin2019  1 month ago

Thanks for spreading the word. I hadn’t heard of Aider before and I’m now going to give it a try today.

SmellTheGlove  1 month ago

Aider is the single best tool I’ve tried. And I’d never heard of it until like 2 weeks ago when someone mentioned it here. I love aider.

  • TeMPOraL  1 month ago

    The irony is, it's sort of a household name on HN for over a year now, being way ahead of what was available commercially on the market - and yet, it seems most people here haven't heard of it.

    (The author used to post a lot of insightful comments here about LLMs and other generative models, too.)

    • ErikBjare  1 month ago

      The same is true of my own gptme, which has been pretty much at parity with Aider along the way.

      Paul (Aider author) is a lot better at writing useful stuff than me though! (like the amazing blog posts)

      1 reply →

    • throwaway314155  1 month ago

      > it's sort of a household name on HN for over a year now, being way ahead of what was available commercially on the market - and yet, it seems most people here haven't heard of it.

      Can you clarify what you mean? If "most people here haven't heard of it" then it's probably not a household name.

ErikBjare  1 month ago

This is why I was asking. My own gptme is also just slightly different from Aider and has been around roughly as long.