Aider
AI pair programming in your terminal: chat with your codebase, every edit auto-committed.
About
Aider is an open-source (Apache 2.0) terminal-based AI pair-programming agent with around 42K–49K GitHub stars. You chat with LLMs to edit code across your entire codebase: it builds a repo map to work in large projects, supports 100+ programming languages, automatically commits each change with sensible messages so you can diff, manage, and undo with normal Git tools, and runs linting and testing after edits.
It works with most major models, supports voice-to-code, lets you add images and web pages to the chat for context, and can be driven from inside an IDE via code comments or through a copy/paste mode with a web LLM. The project's own badge cites roughly 15 billion tokens processed weekly. Limitations: it is terminal-first, so IDE-native developers may prefer an extension-based agent; and like all coding agents, it can introduce subtle bugs that need test coverage to catch.
What it can do
- Chat-driven code editing across full codebases
- Repo map for large projects, 100+ languages
- Auto-commit every change with sensible messages
- Linting, testing, voice-to-code, image context
Setup
Run python -m pip install aider-install then aider-install; launch with aider in any Git repo.
Prerequisites
Python; an LLM API key (works with most major providers).
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 69; Trending score 85/100 from researcher assessment.
★ 49,000 GitHub stars
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.