I'm sorry to hear you had a rough experience trying aider. Have you tried it since GPT-4 Turbo came out with the 128k context window? Running `aider --4-turbo` will use that and be able to handle larger individual source code files.

Aider helps a lot when your codebase is larger than the GPT context window, but the files that need to be edited do have to fit into the window. This is a fairly common situation, where your whole git repo is quite large but most/all of the individual files are reasonably sized.

Aider summarizes the relevant context of the whole repo [0] and shares it along with the files that need to be edited.

The plan is absolutely to solve the problem you describe, and allow GPT to work with individual files which won't fit into the context window. This is less pressing with 128k context now available in GPT 4 Turbo, but there are other benefits to not "over sharing" with GPT. Selective sharing will decrease token costs and likely help GPT focus on the task at hand and not become distracted/confused by a mountain of irrelevant code. Aider already does this sort of contextually aware selective sharing with the "repo map" [0], so the needed work is to extend that concept to a sub-file granularity.

[0] https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html#using-a-repo-map-to-pro...