Aider was designed to do single turns becasue LLMs were way worse when it was created. That being said, Aider could do multiple turns of tool calling if command confirmation was turned off, and it was trivial to configure Aider to do multiple turns of code generation by having a test suite that runs automatically on changes and telling Aider to implement functionality to get the tests to pass. It's hard coded to only do 3 autonomous turns by default but you can edit that.
Yes but unfortunately it appears that Aider development has completely stopped. There had been an MCP support PR that was open for over half a year, many people validated it and worked on it but the project owner never responded.
It’s a bit of a shame, as there are plenty of people that would love to help maintain it.
I would love to know more. I used aider with local models and it behaved like cursor in agent mode. Unfortunately I dont remember exactly when (+6 months ago at least). What was your experience with it?
I was a heavy user, but stopped using it mid 2024. It was essentially providing codebase context and editing and writing code as you instructed - a decent step up from copy/paste to ChatGPT but not working in an agentic loop. There was logic to attempt code edits again if they failed to apply too.
Edit: I stand corrected though. Did a bit of research and aider is considered an agentic tool by late 2023 with auto lint/test steps that feedback to the LLM. My apologies.
They are not at all the same thing. For starters, even ‘till this day, it doesn’t support ReAct-based tool calling.
It’s more like an assistant that advices you rather than a tool that you hand full control to.
Not saying that either is better, but they’re not the same thing.
Aider was designed to do single turns becasue LLMs were way worse when it was created. That being said, Aider could do multiple turns of tool calling if command confirmation was turned off, and it was trivial to configure Aider to do multiple turns of code generation by having a test suite that runs automatically on changes and telling Aider to implement functionality to get the tests to pass. It's hard coded to only do 3 autonomous turns by default but you can edit that.
Yes but unfortunately it appears that Aider development has completely stopped. There had been an MCP support PR that was open for over half a year, many people validated it and worked on it but the project owner never responded.
It’s a bit of a shame, as there are plenty of people that would love to help maintain it.
I guess sometimes that’s just how things go.
Aider wasn't really an agentic loop before Claude Code came along
I would love to know more. I used aider with local models and it behaved like cursor in agent mode. Unfortunately I dont remember exactly when (+6 months ago at least). What was your experience with it?
I was a heavy user, but stopped using it mid 2024. It was essentially providing codebase context and editing and writing code as you instructed - a decent step up from copy/paste to ChatGPT but not working in an agentic loop. There was logic to attempt code edits again if they failed to apply too.
Edit: I stand corrected though. Did a bit of research and aider is considered an agentic tool by late 2023 with auto lint/test steps that feedback to the LLM. My apologies.
Plenty of aider-era tools were though, like my own gptme which is about as old as aider