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Comment by bckr | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been playing with it and I don’t like it that much? I’m not sure why. It feels a little buggy and like it’s doing too much.

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Interesting. I occasionally feel that way with Claude as the backend. Still the best backend that’s reliable, although o3-mini-high in architecture mode with Claude is very good.

I find Claude wants to edit files that I don’t like to be edited often. Two ways I deal with that - first, you can import ‘read only’ files, which is super helpful for focusing. Second, you can use a chat mode first to talk over plans, and when you’re happy say “go”.

I think the thing to do is try and use it at a fairly high level, then drop down and critique. Essentially use it as a team of impressive motivation and mid quality.

You’re being downvoted for some reason but I feel the same. It’s cool tech but I’ve found I often need to revert changes. It’s far too aggressive with tweaking files. Maybe I can adjust in the settings, idk. Also, it’s expensive as hell to run with Claude sonnet. Cost me like $0.01 per action on a small project, insane. At this point I still prefer the chat interface.

You can basically get the same experience as aider with an MCP server like https://github.com/rusiaaman/wcgw. It's not perfect - sometimes has trouble with exact syntax of find/replace. But it's free to use up to your regular Claude subscription usage limit. I actually use it more than Cursor, because it's easier to flip back and forth between architecting/editing.

Thanks! I’ll take a look at this. It always kind of annoyed me to pay for API credits on top of a subscription, lol.

$0.01 per action that can potentially save you tens of minutes to hours of work sounds like a pretty good deal to me, if I compare this to my hourly wage.

> $0.01 per action that can potentially save you tens of minutes to hours of work sounds like a pretty good deal to me

Save tens of hours in one commit?! No model is this good yet[1] - especially not Aider with its recommended models. I fully agree with parent - current SoTA models require lots of handholding in the domains I care about, and the AI chat/pairing setup works much better compared to the AI creating entire commits/PRs before a human gets to look at it.

1. If they were, Zuckerberg would have already announced another round of layoffs.

Ten hours in one commit? Nope, not yet, but it works great to test out ideas and get unstuck when trying to decide how to proceed. Instead of having to choose, just do both or at least try 1 right away instead of bike-shedding.

I often get hung up on UI, I can’t make a decision on what I think will look decent and so I just sort of lock up. Aider lets me focus on the logic and then have the LLM spit out the UI. Since I’ve given up on projects before due to the UI aspect (lose interest because I don’t feel like I’m making progress, or get overwhelmed by all the UI I’ll need to write) this is a huge boon to me.

I’m not incapable of writing UI, I’m just slower at it so Aider is like having a wiz junior developer who can crank out UI when I need it. I’m even fine to rewrite every line of the UI by hand before “shipping”, the LLM just helps me not get stuck on what it should look like. It lets me focus on the feature.

$0.01 per action? Yeah, and I’ve gotten up to 10 cents or so I think in a “single” action but so what? The most I’ve ever spent with it in one go has been like $5 for a couple hours (maybe even 6-8) of on and off usage. That $5 was completely worth it.

Also you can use local models if you want it to be “free”.

A running total of the "cost of my side project" doesn't feel particularly good.

I understand that, I sympathize with that. I hate being “metered” and even low cost or high limits doesn’t fully remove that annoyance.

The thing is, all side projects have a cost, even if it’s just time. I’m happy to let some of my side projects move forward faster if it means paying a small amount of money.

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