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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

> What do you recommand to get a Claude-code-like experience in the open-source + local llm ecosystem?

There is nothing at the moment that I would recommend. However I'm quite convinced that we will see this soon. First of all I quite like where SST's OpenCode is going. The upcoming UX looks really good. Secondly because having that in place, will make it quite easy to put local models in when they get better. The issue really is that there are just not enough good models for tool usage yet. Sonnet is so shockingly good because it was trained for excellent tool usage. Even Gemini does not come close yet.

This is all just a question of time though.

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Have you tried aider, and if so, how is it lacking compared to Claude Code in your opinion?

I only tried aider with hosted models and it's too expensive compared to Claude Code so I did not give it a real proper try.

How is it more expensive?

You pay for aider with per-token pricing. Claude Code comes with a flatrate that gives you deep discounts.

Really depends on the type of coding you plan to do and how much.

The amusing thing is people normally recommend using aider to save money. With Aider, you can control the size of the context window, and selectively add/drop files from the window. I typically aim for under 25K tokens at a time. With Gemini, that's about 3 cents per prompt (and often much less when I have only, say, 10 tokens). So for me, I'd need to do well over 3000 coding prompts a month to get to $100. I simply don't use it that much.

Also, at work, I have Copilot, and one can use Aider with that. So I only pay for my personal coding at home.

Getting to the original question - Aider probably lags Claude Code significantly at this point. It's a fantastic tool and I still use it - primarily because it is editor agnostic. But some of the other tools out there do a lot more with agents.

To give you an idea - my combined AI use - including for non-code purposes - is well under $20/mo. Under $10 for most months. I simply don't have that much time to do coding in my free time - even with an AI doing it!

Aider is worth some tinkering for slightly different reasons than Claude Code.

I find agents do a lot of derpy shit for hard problems but when you've got fairly straightforward things to build it's nice to just spin them up, let them rip and walk away.

Aider feels more like pair programming with an agent, it can kind of be spun up and let rip, but mostly it tries to keep a tighter feedback loop with the user and stay more user directed, which is really powerful when working on challenging things. For stuff like codebase refactors, documentation passes, etc that tight loop feels like overkill though.

I have tried both, and aider is far less able when it comes to navigating your codebase, and self driving investigation. You are very involved in context management with aider, whereas claude code can use cli commands to do a lot of things itself.

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