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Comment by _345 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that has had bad experiences with aider? For me each time I've tried it, I had to wrestle with and beg the AI to do what I wanted it to do, almost always ending in me just taking over and doing it myself.

If nearly everytime I use it to accomplish something it gets it 40-85% correct and I have to go in to fix the other 60-15%, what is the point? It's as slow as hand writing code then, if not slower, and my flow with Continue is simply better:

1. CTRL L block of code 2. Ask a question or give a task 3. I read what it says and then apply the change myself by CTRL C and then tweaking the one or two little things it inevitably misunderstood about my system and its requirements

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Aider is quite configurable, you need to look at the leaderboard and copy one of the high performing model/config setups. Additionally, you need to autoload files such as the readme and coding guidelines for your project.

Aider's killer features are integration of automated lint/typecheck/test and fix loops with git checkpointing. If you're not setting up these features you aren't getting the full value proposition from it.

Never used the tool. But it seems both aider and cursor are not at their strongest out of the box? I read similar thing about cursor and doing custom configuration so it picks up coding guidelines etc etc. Is there some kind of agreed best practice standard that is documented or just try and error best practices from users sharing these?

Aider's leaderboard is a baseline "best practice" for model/edit format/mode selection. Beyond that, it's basically whatever you think are best practices in engineering and code style, which you should capture in documents that can serve double duty both for AI and for human contributors. Given that a lot of this stuff is highly contentious it's really up to you as to pick and choose what you prefer.

That depends on models you use and your prompts.

Use gemini-2.5pro or sonnet3.5/3.7 or gpt-4.1

Be as specific and detailed in your prompts as you can. Include the right context.

and what do you do if you value privacy and don't want to share everything in your project with silicon valley, or you don't want to spend $8/hr to watch Claude do your hobby for you?

I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.

If I have to write a prompt as long as Claude's system prompt in order to get reliable edits, I'm not sure I've saved any time at all.

At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.

I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of vram to do so.

I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these urls' and it performed remarkably well.

Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you run locally on a cpu.

Local models just aren't there yet in terms of being able to host locally on your laptop without extra hardware.

We're hoping that one of the big labs will distill an ~8B to ~32B parameter model that performs SOTA benchmarks! This would be huge both in cost and probably make it reasonable for most people to code with agents in parallel.

Is this post just you yelling at the wind? What does this have to do with the post you replied to?

> At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.

I don't see it as an admission. I'd wager 99% of Aider users simply haven't tried local models.

Although I would expect they would be much worse than Sonnet, etc.

> I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.

Examples? Aider is a great tool and much (probably most) of it is written by AI.

This is exactly the issue I have with copilot in office. It doesn't learn from my style so I have to be very specific how I want things. At that point it's quicker to just write it myself.

Perhaps when it can dynamically learn on the go this will be better. But right now it's not terribly useful.

I really wonder why dynamic learning hasn't been explored more. It would be a huge moat for the labs (everyone would have to host and dynamically train their own model with a major lab). Seems like it would make the AI way smarter too.

> or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.

There's no such thing as a "right prompt". It's all snake oil. https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering

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