Unfortunately aider is showing its age. It is great for what it does, but better LLMs + "agentic" have shown that you can get more in the swe domain.
There was a paper recently where they had an LLM evolve tool harnesses and got ~20% more than w/ aider on the benchmark they used, so it's pretty clear that the models + tools (+better harness) are better than just aider.
1) You can plug in any model into aider 2) It can be quite agentic
> evolve tool harnesses
Claude code & Gemini cli etc. don't do this either
Don't get me wrong, I love aider and I've been using it since the early days. I'm just commenting on the overall "gains" and imo they are higher with the latest tools (claude code, gemini, etc).
As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the diffs that aider expects.
As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same model in the short, medium and long term.
Oh, that's a good point, I misunderstood you to mean: The LLM writes it's own harnesses etc.