Aider in Your IDE

First, if you're going to use this in the IntelliJ terminal, make sure to use the dark-mode flag. Honestly the IntelliJ terminal doesn't do the best at rendering Aider's output because IntelliJ's terminal doesn't really like things that update frequently. It still works pretty well and Aider has nicely formatted output in general.

Using llama3.1 8B locally is OK at best, and makes incorrect changes at worst (the 8B model isn't really recommended in Aider's documentation, anyway). I only have 8GB of vram, so I can't really run any better models locally. I gave gpt-4o a try and it works pretty well at editing code. I probably won't pay for OpenAI access forever, though. https://aider.chat/docs/llms.html says that Gemini 1.5 Pro can be accessed for free and works decently, so maybe I'll give that a try next.

The git integration is useful, but I don't really like that Aider will commit to my current branch to make it easy to undo its changes. I like changes being easy to undo, but I don't really want to have to squash these changes before pushing. I disabled the auto commits, and now I just have to make sure that I don't let Aider run wild on any file with a bunch of changes on it.

Maybe the automatic commits work for others' workflow, but it won't work for mine. I'll keep playing with this because it seems really cool.

Cursor is going the right way — suggesting caret movements, or editing relevant parts of the file automatically. But it's a completely separate app, based on VSCode, and it just doesn't cut it for working with Java.

I'd pay serious money for an IJ plugin that actually helps me — monitors warnings and proactively suggests fixes, performs edits on relevant bits of code elsewhere after I make a change, or integrates with refactoring tools. I'm sure the possibilities are endless, yet even Jetbrains' own plugin is incredibly basic