Last night, I got Aider properly set up on my laptop, both in the terminal and in neovim. It is remarkable. I honestly see how people get into a lot of trouble with vibe coding using tools like this. It’s a world of difference from chatting with Claude.ai via the web, or using GitHub Copilot as a fancy autocomplete. It self-confidently makes changes to code across a repo, in a way that’s scarily easy to go along with.

I signed up for an OpenAI API key to use their o3 model with Aider. This involved some rather creepy identity confirmation, which I was not too happy about. o3 costs money but is not super expensive; I spent several hours coding with Aider and o3 last night and it cost me $0.46. It is also neat that you can swap models in or out with Aider, depending on your needs, or the changing technology, or your sense of whimsy.

Lastly, I have to say that the git integration is pretty cool. This is not usually the kind of thing that I like: my default stance is almost always “don’t touch the git repo!”, but Aider does it well. There is an /undo feature that is very useful.

So far my impression is that this is a very powerful, dangerous tool. I wonder if there are ways to use it that are safe and reasonable. We will see.

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