Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

I think Aider is closest to what you want.

The chat interface is optimal to me because you often are asking questions and seeking guidance or proposals as you are making actual code changes. On reason I do like it is that its default mode of operation is to make a commit for each change it makes. So it is extremely clear what the AI did vs what you did vs what is a hodge podge of both.

As others have mentioned, you can integrate with your IDE through the watch mode. It's somewhat crude but still useful way. But I find myself more often than not just running Aider in a terminal under the code editor window and chatting with it about what's in the window.

View on HN

> I think Aider is closest to what you want.

> The chat interface

Seems very much not, if it's still a chat interface :) Figuring out a chat UX is easy compared to something that was creating with letting LLM fill in some parts from the beginning. I guess I'm searching for something with a different paradigm than just "chat + $Something".

the question is, how do you want to provide instructions for what the AI is to do? You might not like calling it "chat" but somehow you need to communicate that, right? With aider you can write a comment for a function and then instruct it to finish the function inline (see other comments). But unless you just want pure autocomplete based on it guessing things, you need to provide guidance to it somehow.

I don't know exactly, but I guess in a more declarative manner rather than anything. Maybe we set goals/milestones/concrete objectives, or similar, rather than imperatively steer it, give it space to experiment yet make it very easy to understand exactly what important tradeoffs everything is doing.

It's all very fluffy and theoretical of course.

I find a good compromise on that front is not to use the chat primarily, but to create files like 'ARCHITECTURE.md', 'REQUIREMENTS.md' and put information in there describing how the application works. Then you add those to the chat as context docs.From the chat interface then you are just referring to those not just describing features willy nilly. So the nice thing is you are building documentation for the application in a formal sense as part of instructing the LLM.

But that is the typical agentic LLM coder style program I was initially referring to, saying we maybe should explore other alternatives to. It's too basic and primitive, with some imagination.

I think the problem is that models are just not that good yet. At least for my usage at work, the CLI tools are the fastest way to get something useful, but if you can't describe basically exactly what you want, you get garbage.

They are good enough, but people aren't exploring other UIs enough. The TUI tools (which I think you're referring to, Codex, Claude Code et al) are a good start, but they feel like a prototype compared to a completely different UI. You'd still describe what you want, but not imperative in a chat window, but some other manner.

The typical "best practice" for these tools tend to be to ask it something like

"I want you to do feature X. Analyse the code for me and make suggestions how to implement this feature."

Then it will go off and work for a while and typically come back after a bit with some suggestions. Then iterate on those if needed and end with.

"Ok. Now take these decided upon ideas and create a plan for how to implement. And create new tests where appropriate."

Then it will go off and come back with a plan for what to do. And then you send it off with.

"Ok, start implementing."

So sure. You probably can work on this to make it easier to use than with a CLI chat. It would likely be less like an IDE and more like a planning tool you'd use with human colleagues though.

Aider can be a chat interface and it's great for that but you can also use it from your editor by telling it to watch your files.[1]

So you'd write a function name and then tell it to flesh it out.

  function factorial(n) // Implement this. AI!

Becomes:

  function factorial(n) {
    if (n === 0 || n === 1) {
      return 1;
    } else {
      return n \* factorial(n - 1);
    }
  }

Last I looked Aider's maintainer has had to focus on other things recently, but aider-ce is a fantastic fork.

I'm really curious to try Mistral's vibe, but even though I'm a big fanboi I don't want to be tied to just one model. Aider lets tier your models such that your big, expensive model can do all the thinking and then stuff like code reviews can run through a smaller model. It's a pretty capable tool

Edit: Fix formatting

[1] https://aider.chat/docs/usage/watch.html

> I don't want to be tied to just one model.

Very much this for me - I really don't get why, given a new models are popping out every month from different providers, people are so happy to sink themselves into provider ecosystems when there are open source alternatives that work with any model.

The main problem with Aider is it isn't agentic enough for a lot of people but to me that's a benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com