Comment by zmmmmm

13 hours ago

I think Aider is closest to what you want.

The chat interface is optimal to me because you often are asking questions and seeking guidance or proposals as you are making actual code changes. On reason I do like it is that its default mode of operation is to make a commit for each change it makes. So it is extremely clear what the AI did vs what you did vs what is a hodge podge of both.

As others have mentioned, you can integrate with your IDE through the watch mode. It's somewhat crude but still useful way. But I find myself more often than not just running Aider in a terminal under the code editor window and chatting with it about what's in the window.

9 comments

zmmmmm

embedding-shape 13 hours ago

> I think Aider is closest to what you want.

> The chat interface

Seems very much not, if it's still a chat interface :) Figuring out a chat UX is easy compared to something that was creating with letting LLM fill in some parts from the beginning. I guess I'm searching for something with a different paradigm than just "chat + $Something".

zmmmmm 11 hours ago
the question is, how do you want to provide instructions for what the AI is to do? You might not like calling it "chat" but somehow you need to communicate that, right? With aider you can write a comment for a function and then instruct it to finish the function inline (see other comments). But unless you just want pure autocomplete based on it guessing things, you need to provide guidance to it somehow.
- embedding-shape 11 hours ago
  
  I don't know exactly, but I guess in a more declarative manner rather than anything. Maybe we set goals/milestones/concrete objectives, or similar, rather than imperatively steer it, give it space to experiment yet make it very easy to understand exactly what important tradeoffs everything is doing.
  It's all very fluffy and theoretical of course.
  
  4 replies →

troyvit 13 hours ago

Aider can be a chat interface and it's great for that but you can also use it from your editor by telling it to watch your files.[1]

So you'd write a function name and then tell it to flesh it out.

  function factorial(n) // Implement this. AI!

Becomes:

  function factorial(n) {
    if (n === 0 || n === 1) {
      return 1;
    } else {
      return n \* factorial(n - 1);
    }
  }

Last I looked Aider's maintainer has had to focus on other things recently, but aider-ce is a fantastic fork.

I'm really curious to try Mistral's vibe, but even though I'm a big fanboi I don't want to be tied to just one model. Aider lets tier your models such that your big, expensive model can do all the thinking and then stuff like code reviews can run through a smaller model. It's a pretty capable tool

Edit: Fix formatting

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

zmmmmm 12 hours ago

> I don't want to be tied to just one model.
Very much this for me - I really don't get why, given a new models are popping out every month from different providers, people are so happy to sink themselves into provider ecosystems when there are open source alternatives that work with any model.
The main problem with Aider is it isn't agentic enough for a lot of people but to me that's a benefit.