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Comment by machiaweliczny | Hacker News Reader

Just use aider - it’s CLI and open source. You can open terminal in IDE and you just use /add file for context then /drop to clean context. Better than Copilot and just less worse UX than Cursor (which has benefit of knowing which page you have open). There’s also Claude engineer but not tested it yet.

Forgot to mention killer feature - droping links to docs automatically fetches them in aider which helps with grounding for specific tasks

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Look, I'm just not interested in something that gives me code on the CLI. This is no better or worse than using ChatGPT / Canvas or any other external tool.

My project has well over half a million lines of code. I'm using an IDE (in my case Qt Creator) for a reason. I'd love to get help from an LLM but CLI or external browser windows just aren't the way. The overhead of copy/paste and lack of context is a deal breaker unfortunately.

In case I'm missing something, please let me know. I'm always happy to learn.

As i understand things you...

- want to use your particular ide which does not have the llm plugin.

- don't want to use any of several ide's that support several llm's using a picker.

- don't want to use copy/paste to a web browser or other tool

- don't want to use 2 ide's at the same time if 1 of them is not your favorite

I would settle for the 3rd or 4th option, both work very well for me.

What I'm trying right now is two IDEs -- PyCharm for navigating around and static analysis stuff, Cursor for "how do I do this" or "please do this for me." Cursor (VSCode?) lets you choose Jetbrains keyboard shortcuts during setup and is relatively resource light so it's not too bad.

Aider operates on your file tree / repo and edits and creates files in place. So it at least lessens the copy / paste drastically. This is a very different experience than using chatgpt or Claude on web. Still not ideal UX compared to having it in the IDE though to be clear.

I'd never heard of Qt creator before so I checked it out and their whole front page seems to focus on ai integration?

Cool, this must be fairly recent. I didn't realize they had integrated it. Will check it out, thanks!

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