maybe my settings were off but i tried aider when it first came out and kept coming back to it and it ended up being super slow and generating subpar stuff compared to just chat. actually turned me off to CLI based style code assistants.
claude code blew my mind, however. really great for refactoring existing stuff with a proper CLAUDE.md file or one-shotting small features. i mainly use it for scaffolding, sounding board and refactoring but it's been a game changer (albeit more expensive).
still like to use boring chat-based and pasting back and forth as it helps me approach and understand issues better for later on. i find generating huge blocks of code/files to feel like magic but then u dig into a bug later and find the LLM wrote or structured a bunch of semi-garbage that you have to undo.