I like aider's solution of encapsulating each edit in a git commit; I hope that gets widely adopted.
There was a paper recently where they had an LLM evolve tool harnesses and got ~20% more than w/ aider on the benchmark they used, so it's pretty clear that the models + tools (+better harness) are better than just aider.
> evolve tool harnesses
Claude code & Gemini cli etc. don't do this either
As for 1), I agree but you force the model to work within aider's constraints. Claude4 for example excels at the agentic flow and it's better at that than providing the diffs that aider expects.
As for the last sentence, I disagree. They are evolving the stack, and more importantly they are evolving both at the same time, stack + LLM. That's the main reason they all subsidise use atm, they are gathering data to improve both. If I were to place a bet right now, I'd say that provider_tool + provider_LLM > 3rd party tool + same model in the short, medium and long term.