Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 170 posts

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#141

Post by wsintra2022 »

mcluck wrote: post #102
pocketarc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally the use for me has been in writing boilerplate. As an example, one of my ongoing goals has been to port all the view code of a project to another framework, following its idioms. Using an LLM, I can process a file in a couple of seconds, and checking that everything is right takes just a few seconds as well. It’d take me hours to go through every file manually, and it’d be prone to human error. It’s not te…

Call me a caveman but the lack of an option to use AI tools offline is a massive downside to me. I am connected to the internet most of the time but I take comfort in knowing that, for most of my work, I could lose my connection and not even notice

Try ollama You can run models locally.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#142

Post by paradite »

alexose wrote: post #73
fvdessen wrote: post #29

I just tried it and it's amazingly cool, but the quality of the output just isn't there for me yet. It makes too much subtle errors to be as useful as the screenshots and the gifs makes it look

I agree with you. It's okay at really simple code changes for really simple repos, but it falls apart for anything outside the ordinary. I'm sure I'll have to eat these words, but: This just doesn't feel like the right interface to me. LLMs are incredible at generating "inroads" to a problem, but terrible at execution. Worse yet at anticipating future problems. All this might very well change. But until it does, I ju…

Hi, for somewhere between GitHub Copilot and aider, you can try the desktop app 16x Prompt. I have been using it daily for the past few months and it suits my working style nicely.

It is capable of handling complex tasks like feature development and refactoring across multiple files, but it doesn't try to generate diff and apply them automatically.

Instead, you will get a response from LLM that is easy to read and allow you as a developer to quickly apply to your existing codebase.

You can check it out here: https://prompt.16x.engineer/

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#143

Post by latexr »

pocketarc wrote: post #90
vander_elst wrote: post #84

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

Personally the use for me has been in writing boilerplate. As an example, one of my ongoing goals has been to port all the view code of a project to another framework, following its idioms. Using an LLM, I can process a file in a couple of seconds, and checking that everything is right takes just a few seconds as well. It’d take me hours to go through every file manually, and it’d be prone to human error. It’s not te…

> It’d take me hours to go through every file manually, and it’d be prone to human error.

The LLM output is also extremely prone to error, so it’s not like the second part of your sentence is a valid argument.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#144

Post by anotherpaulg »

vander_elst wrote: post #84

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

Thanks for checking out aider.

That demo GIF is just showing a toy example. To see what it's like to work with aider on more complex changes you can check out the examples page [0].

The demo GIF was just intended to convey the general workflow that aider provides: you ask for some changes and aider shares your existing code base with the LLM, collects back the suggested code edits, applies them to your code and git commits with a sensible commit message.

This workflow is generally a big improvement over manually cutting and pasting bits of code back and forth between the ChatGPT UI and your IDE.

Beyond just sending the code that needs to be edited, aider also sends GPT a "repository map" [1] that gives it the overall context of your codebase. This makes aider more effective when working in larger code bases.

[0] https://aider.chat/examples/

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/repomap.html

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#145

Post by anotherpaulg »

perbu wrote: post #87

I have this 300 line Go application which manages git tags for me. I asked it to implement a -dry-run function. It failed twice. First time it just mangled the file. Second time it just made code that didn't do anything. I asked it to rename a global variable. It broke the application and failed to understand scoping rules. Perhaps it is bad luck, or perhaps my Go code is weird, but I don't understand how y'all wanna…

Thanks for trying aider, and sorry to hear you had trouble working with it. It might be worth looking through some of the tips on the aider GitHub page [0].

In particular, this is one of the most important tips: Large changes are best performed as a sequence of thoughtful bite sized steps, where you plan out the approach and overall design. Walk GPT through changes like you might with a junior dev. Ask for a refactor to prepare, then ask for the actual change. Spend the time to ask for code quality/structure improvements.

Not sure if this was a factor in your attempts? I'd be happy to help you if you'd like to open an GitHub issue [1] our jump into our discord [2].

[0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider#tips

[1] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider/issues/new/choose

[2] https://discord.gg/Tv2uQnR88V

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#146

Post by wongarsu »

vander_elst wrote: post #84

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

One example where I successfully used an AI tool (plain ChatGPT) went a bit like this:

Me: Can you give me code for a simple image viewer in python? It should be able to open images via a file open dialog as well as show the previous and next image in the folder

GPT: [code doing that with tkinter]

Me: That code has a bug because the path handling is wrong on windows

GPT: [tries to convince me that the code isn't broken, fixes it regardless]

Me: Can you add keyboard shortcuts for the previous and next buttons

GPT: [adds keyboard shortcuts]

After that I did all development the old fashioned way, but that alone saved me a good chunk of time. Since it was just internal tooling for myself code quality didn't matter, and I wasn't too upset about the questionable error handling choices

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#147

Post by [deleted] »

vander_elst wrote: post #84

With all these AI tools requiring a prompt, does it really simplify/speed up things? From the example: I have to write "add a name param to the 'greeting' function, add all types", then wait for the result to be generated, read it carefully to be sure that it does what I want, probably reiterate if the result does not match the expectation. This seems to me more time consuming than actually do the work myself. Does a…

[deleted]

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#148

Post by s_dev »

JensRantil wrote: post #128

It gets commit messages wrong. Commit messages should signal intent, not what the patch does. "changing an enum" is a horrible commit message.

Adopt a convention like commitizen: https://github.com/commitizen/cz-cli

'typeofchange(scopeofchange): reason for change'

It sort helps force devs to type out more meaningful commit messages.

Re: Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal

#149

Post by j45 »

danenania wrote: post #6

People interested in Aider (which is an awesome tool) might also be interested in checking out my project Plandex[1]. It's terminal-based like Aider and has a somewhat comparable set of features, but is more focused on using LLMs to work on larger and more complex tasks that span many files and model responses. It also uses a git-style CLI approach with independent commands for each action vs. Aider's interactive she…

Can you describe how you read in a repo any better than aider?

Aider has a few blog posts speaking to it.

Post reply on HN