it's night and day. It's so much more productive because the amount of time needed to ask a question is near zero.
Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#112I'm SO surprised to not see aider-chat everywhere mentionned. I've been using it for about a year and it's incredible. My take is that most people did not invest the little time necessary to get acustomed to its workflow. My advices for aider are: - familiarize yourself with the chat modes (architect, code, ask) - familiarize yourself with the edit modes (diff, whole, etc) and know which to use for a given model. Ind…
This is exactly how I use agent mode in Cursor. I’ve never understood why I would use aider. Am I missing something else?
Possibly: I'm a neovim person and barely leave the terminal. So naturally aider fits perfectly into my setup. There are even neovim plugin for having aider directly in it.
That said, I don't get why people are fine switching their IDE to cursor. Lile, if you're in an IDE it's because it has features you want that others didn't. So either cursor does not have them or if it does then you have to configure the whole cursor IDE to work like your original IDE.
In total you've either lost features or been captured into a new walled garden. And lost some time in the process.
Aider's use of litellm makes it 5s change to switch to the latest models. And it's always up to date thanks to uvx.
No really I don't get why people are not using aider more.
Plus the dev is lovely, responsive and helpful.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#113I'm SO surprised to not see aider-chat everywhere mentionned. I've been using it for about a year and it's incredible. My take is that most people did not invest the little time necessary to get acustomed to its workflow. My advices for aider are: - familiarize yourself with the chat modes (architect, code, ask) - familiarize yourself with the edit modes (diff, whole, etc) and know which to use for a given model. Ind…
Do you find that the time you spend splitting a feature up into small chunks and explaining each small chunk to the LLM takes longer than just writing the code yourself?
I've used aider but found just pounding out some code in neovim to be faster. Perhaps I'm not using aider correctly.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#114They are significantly better! IDEs aren’t just like LLMs; they transform your codebase into embeddings (knowledge), giving them a much greater advantage in understanding larger contexts and effectively acting on the code. Plus, they come with proper tool integrations, allowing them to apply changes seamlessly while including fallback mechanisms to handle any issues during the process.
> they transform your codebase into embeddings (knowledge), giving them a much greater advantage in understanding larger contexts and effectively acting on the code. Is this true? Isn't the context size controlled by the model? Is there any difference (outside convenience) to pasting your code in the web interface?
Sure thing! They can’t just dump all the code from your repository into the context.
The first step is identifying the relevant code in your repo, likely using an indexed vector database. They probably transform your question or prompt into an embedding as well to enhance accuracy. Once they’ve pinpointed the relevant sections, they send those specific parts of your code to the LLMs for processing. I actually wrote an article diving deeper into this concept—check it out!
https://medium.com/@level09/cursors-secret-sauce-the-embed-t...
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't know Unix users were not able to use IDEs. The more you know /s Edit : Sarcastic
I don't know about Unix users, but perhaps, instead, it is they are able to not use IDEs.
I like to laugh at myself a lot but this made me really giggle. Well phrased!
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#116I'm SO surprised to not see aider-chat everywhere mentionned. I've been using it for about a year and it's incredible. My take is that most people did not invest the little time necessary to get acustomed to its workflow. My advices for aider are: - familiarize yourself with the chat modes (architect, code, ask) - familiarize yourself with the edit modes (diff, whole, etc) and know which to use for a given model. Ind…
Aider is to other AI tools what Vim/Neovim is to other IDEs. Super powerful, but with a learning curve most folks don’t want to climb.
https://github.com/hotovo/aider-desk
is a gui, takes 5 mins to install, has MCP support (try context7).
Definitely worth a look and is an "easy" way in to aider.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#117I do this to copy files into the chat `cat file.js | xclip -sel clip` On Linux, this copies the whole file to the clipboard and I can paste it in. This is considerably faster than using the mouse. I can also get a code review done by getting the diff `git diff develop..feature/my-branch | xclip -sel clip`
great tips
if you want more context, aider has /copy-context
that copies the files that you have added to the context, your chat (I think).
you can then paste into a subscription chat app where you're not paying per token
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#118I rolled out Claude Code and Cursor to my whole company. They’re really much better than copy paste. And very affordable compared to professional developer wages. Wrote about it: https://ghiculescu.substack.com/p/nobody-codes-here-anymore
I'm relatively ignorant in this respect, but how do you "roll out Cursor"? Does that mean developers must now switch to using the Cursor IDE? That's quite an ask. I really don't think I'd like having to switch IDEs at this point.
We didn’t mandate it. We just told everyone they can buy if they want to.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#119I struggle in two places - algorithms and understanding all the possible inputs to make a graph in something like MatPlotLib. I find most of my time is wasted trying to get something like those to work and I can do it easily in cursor with Claude 3.7.
I’m rapidly producing something now, and feel uncomfortable with the leverage I’m giving cursor/claude but I am trying to get it done and come back and refactor.
Re: Ask HN: How much better are AI IDEs vs. copy pasting into chat apps?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly how I use agent mode in Cursor. I’ve never understood why I would use aider. Am I missing something else?
Possibly: I'm a neovim person and barely leave the terminal. So naturally aider fits perfectly into my setup. There are even neovim plugin for having aider directly in it. That said, I don't get why people are fine switching their IDE to cursor. Lile, if you're in an IDE it's because it has features you want that others didn't. So either cursor does not have them or if it does then you have to configure the whole cur…
Cursor is a VS Code fork. Anyone coming from VS Code, one of the most popular editors in the ecosystem, will immediately be comfortable. The full marketplace of extensions is compatible. The switchover is effectively seamless besides a handful of keyboard shortcuts used for the new AI features.