Yes they can save you some time, but at the cost of Claude's time and lots of tokens making tool calls attempting to find what it needs to find. Aider is much nicer, from the standpoint that you can add the files you need it to know about, and send it off to do its thing.
I still don't understand why Claude is more popular than Aider, which is by nearly every measure a better tool, and can use whatever LLM is more appropriate for the task at hand.
As a user, I don't want to sit there specifying about 15-30 files, then realize that I've missed some and that it ruins everything. I want to just point the tool at the codebase and tell it: "Go do X. Look at the current implementation and patterns, as well as the tests, alongside the docs. Update everything as needed along the way, here's how you run the tests..."
Indexing the whole codebase into Qdrant might also help a little.
It can be annoying, but I think it both helps me be more aware of what’s being changed (vs just seeing a big diff after a while), and lends itself to working on smaller subtasks that are more likely to work on the first try.
Honestly, it's just this. "Claude the bar button on foo modal is broken with a failed splork". And CC hunts down foo.ts, traces that it's an API call to query.ts, pulls in the associated linked model, traces the api/slork.go and will as often as not end up with "I've found the issue!" and fix it. On a one sentence prompt. I think it's called an "Oh fuck" moment the first time you see this work. And it works remarkably reliably. [handwave caveats, stupid llms, etc]
Use /add-dir in Claude