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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Perhaps when it can dynamically learn on the go this will be better. But right now it's not terribly useful.
There's no such thing as a "right prompt". It's all snake oil. https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering