If you are a developer, the days of sweating alone in front of your screen are over. With Aider, you can enlist the help of a virtual co-pilot that will guide you through the complexities of coding and accompany you in all your creative endeavors.
This tool serves as an assistant capable of optimizing your development workflow simply by conversing with it in the terminal, allowing you to explain what you want to achieve with your codebase. It will then help you step-by-step to reach your objectives.
The major advantage of Aider is its ability to work on multiple files simultaneously and make coordinated changes throughout your project all at once. This means you won’t need to navigate from one file to another to apply even the slightest modification! It analyzes your existing code—regardless of the project’s size—and can provide suggestions that consider the overall architecture.
This remarkable tool operates with major language models like GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision, and Claude 3 Opus. If you enjoy exploring exotic or free options, you can connect it to virtually any other model as well.
You can ask Aider to add features, optimize snippets of code, fix tricky bugs, refactor for improved clarity, and even generate documentation or tests to solidify your project.
Aider edits the code directly in your local source files, and rest assured that every change is properly committed in Git with a message detailing what has been done. This allows you to keep track of what your virtual assistant is producing and revert any changes if it makes a mistake.
The tool is quite intelligent; it even detects when you make changes manually outside of your discussions. This means you can alternate between your preferred code editor and the command line, where Aider patiently awaits to continue collaborating with you.
Of course, there are times when it misunderstands your requests or suggests something completely off the mark, which is why it’s crucial to carefully review its suggestions before blindly accepting them! Overall, I must say it’s impressively effective.
Here’s how to install and use Aider in a few simple steps:
- Install the Aider package using pip:
pip install aider. - Run the command
aiderin your Git project folder:aider <file1> <file2> .... You can specify the files you want to work on or let the tool create them on its own. - Engage with your AI and collaborate on your code! Here are some useful commands:
/add <file>to add a file to the session/drop <file>to remove a file from the session/undoto revert the last Git commit/suggestto get suggestions from the AI/exitto quit
You can also interact directly with the language model using the command /llm. If you want to provide input in the form of tokens, add the option --llm-token.
To give you an idea, here’s a brief example of what this can look like:
There you have it; you understand the concept. It’s fun, interactive, and almost feels like having a real colleague (but less annoying). While it certainly doesn’t replace a human entirely, it’s incredibly handy for basic coding tasks!
So, what are you waiting for? Embrace your new assistant by heading over to: Aider on GitHub.
With that said, I’ll leave you to it—I have an appointment with Aider to reshape the world, or at least my website! 🤖❤️
