I experimented with Claude Code but returned to the familiar Aider which existed before all of these tools AFAIK.

You’ll notice people in Aider GitHub issues being concerned about its rather conservative pace of change, lack of plug-in ecosystem. But I actually started to appreciate these constraints as a way to really familiarise myself with the core “edit files in a loop with an end goal” that is the essence of all agent coding.

Anytime I feel a snazzy feature is lacking from Aider I think about it and realise I can already solve it in Aider by changing the problem to editing a file in a loop.