Aider is worth some tinkering for slightly different reasons than Claude Code.
I find agents do a lot of derpy shit for hard problems but when you've got fairly straightforward things to build it's nice to just spin them up, let them rip and walk away.
Aider feels more like pair programming with an agent, it can kind of be spun up and let rip, but mostly it tries to keep a tighter feedback loop with the user and stay more user directed, which is really powerful when working on challenging things. For stuff like codebase refactors, documentation passes, etc that tight loop feels like overkill though.
I have tried both, and aider is far less able when it comes to navigating your codebase, and self driving investigation. You are very involved in context management with aider, whereas claude code can use cli commands to do a lot of things itself.
I only tried aider with hosted models and it's too expensive compared to Claude Code so I did not give it a real proper try.
Aider is worth some tinkering for slightly different reasons than Claude Code.
I find agents do a lot of derpy shit for hard problems but when you've got fairly straightforward things to build it's nice to just spin them up, let them rip and walk away.
Aider feels more like pair programming with an agent, it can kind of be spun up and let rip, but mostly it tries to keep a tighter feedback loop with the user and stay more user directed, which is really powerful when working on challenging things. For stuff like codebase refactors, documentation passes, etc that tight loop feels like overkill though.
How is it more expensive?
You pay for aider with per-token pricing. Claude Code comes with a flatrate that gives you deep discounts.
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I have tried both, and aider is far less able when it comes to navigating your codebase, and self driving investigation. You are very involved in context management with aider, whereas claude code can use cli commands to do a lot of things itself.