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Comment by ErikBjare | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that different to Claude with tools via MCP, or my own terminal-based gptme? (https://github.com/ErikBjare/gptme)

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I thought it's basically a subset of Aider[0] bolted into a VS Code fork, and I remain confused as to why we're talking about it so much now, when we didn't about Aider before. Some kind of startup-friendly bias? I for one would prefer OSS to succeed in this space.

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

I tried aider and had problems having it update code in existing files. Aider uses a search and replace pattern to update existing code. So you often end up with

    >>>SEARCH
        }
    >>>REPLACE
        }, {'more': 'data'}

Of course aider will try to apply this kind of patch even when the search pattern matches several occurrences in the target file. Looking at the Github issues, this is a problem that was brought up several times and was never fixed because apparently it's not even problematic. I moved to cursor, which doesn't have this problem, and never looked back.

For what it's worth, gptme will refuse non-unique matches (and ask the LLM to try again). I thought Aider did too (easy win after all), but apparently not.

For me this happened at the end of functions in vanilla JS; I used to work around it by putting "// end of foo()" comments after the closing brace. However, Aider has multiple modes for LLM editing, including diff, udiff, and whole file; you can switch between those when needed.

Somewhat cynically, maybe because there's VC in Cursor.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/19/in-just-4-months-ai-coding...

Thanks for spreading the word. I hadn’t heard of Aider before and I’m now going to give it a try today.

Aider is the single best tool I’ve tried. And I’d never heard of it until like 2 weeks ago when someone mentioned it here. I love aider.

The irony is, it's sort of a household name on HN for over a year now, being way ahead of what was available commercially on the market - and yet, it seems most people here haven't heard of it.

(The author used to post a lot of insightful comments here about LLMs and other generative models, too.)

The same is true of my own gptme, which has been pretty much at parity with Aider along the way.

Paul (Aider author) is a lot better at writing useful stuff than me though! (like the amazing blog posts)

Thanks for mentioning this, because I somehow managed to miss gptme all that time! I'll check it out now.

> it's sort of a household name on HN for over a year now, being way ahead of what was available commercially on the market - and yet, it seems most people here haven't heard of it.

Can you clarify what you mean? If "most people here haven't heard of it" then it's probably not a household name.

This is why I was asking. My own gptme is also just slightly different from Aider and has been around roughly as long.

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