Aider

What is Aider?

Aider is an open-source command-line tool for pair programming with large language models. It edits code across your repository and records each change as a git commit, working with most popular programming languages.

Key capabilities of Aider

• Codebase mapping: Builds a map of the repository to handle larger projects.
• Git integration: Automatically commits changes with descriptive messages.
• Linting and testing: Runs lint and tests and attempts fixes for failures.
• Voice input: Speak requests for code changes.
• Images and web pages: Add screenshots or pages as context.

How Aider works

You install aider with pip, start it in a git repository, add files to the chat and describe the change you want. Aider sends the request and a repository map to your chosen model, applies the edits, and commits them so you can review or undo with git. You pay your model provider directly for API usage.

Who uses Aider?

Developers comfortable in the terminal who want full control over models and costs use it. Its documentation recommends strong models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 and V3, and OpenAI o1, o3-mini and GPT-4o.

Aider pricing

Aider is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Costs come only from the API usage of whichever model provider you connect, and local models can be used with no per-token fee.

Aider alternatives

GitHub Copilot and Cursor integrate AI into editors, Windsurf is an agentic IDE, and Claude Code is Anthropic's terminal agent. Aider is notable for being open source and model-agnostic.