Comment by joelthelion

3 days ago

How does Claude code, trained to use its tools, compare to a model agnostic equivalentsuch as aider? Have you tried both?

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joelthelion

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vessenes  3 days ago

I'm an extensive user of both. aider was the best a few months ago -- claude code is substantially more performant and easier to work with as a dev, regardless of aider's underlying model.

Between claude code and gemini, you can really feel the difference in the tool training / implementation -- Anthropic's ahead of the game here in terms of integrating a suite of tools for claude to use.

When I have a difficult problem or claude is spinning, I usually would use o3-pro, although today I threw something by Grok 4 and it was excellent, finding a subtle bug and provided some clear communication about a fix, and the fix.

Anyway, I suggest you give them a go. But start with claude or gemini's CLI - right now, if you want a text UI for coding, they are the easiest to work with.

  • jswny  3 days ago

    Have you tried the codex CLI? And how does it compare to those other CLI agents if so?

    • Karrot_Kream  2 days ago

      The Codex CLI feels a lot more unpolished than the others. If you look at the repo's commit history, they're in the middle of a rewrite. The CLI often tries to involve calls on the Codex model using APIs that don't exist anymore. It's a mess.

      It is model agnostic however.