Comment by andai

I actually made a custom harness based on Aider's edit format (the find/replace thing). (I think most AI stuff ended up using a very similar format.)

It just does what I need and no more: load code into context, append my question or instruction, call LLM, apply patches. Repeat.

I haven't used Aider itself though, maybe it does that too.

My harness was nice relative to Claude Code and Codex because, it doesn't need to poke around the filesystem (cause I have small repos and dump the whole thing), and it makes all edits simultaneously (doesn't need to edit one file at a time).

It reads all files and edits all necessary files in a single round trip.

The really nice thing is that when you're making many small fine grained changes like that, you can use a much smaller, faster, cheaper model.

And if it's fast enough, it actually becomes a real-time activity. It's not "prompt, wait..." but "prompt, immediately get the result." It's interactive. You stay active and engaged. It's great.