retrodaredevil 2 months ago

I've been giving this a try for the past day and thought I'd talk about my experience setting it up in IntelliJ's terminal.

First, if you're going to use this in the IntelliJ terminal, make sure to use the dark-mode flag. Honestly the IntelliJ terminal doesn't do the best at rendering Aider's output because IntelliJ's terminal doesn't really like things that update frequently. It still works pretty well and Aider has nicely formatted output in general.

Using llama3.1 8B locally is OK at best, and makes incorrect changes at worst (the 8B model isn't really recommended in Aider's documentation, anyway). I only have 8GB of vram, so I can't really run any better models locally. I gave gpt-4o a try and it works pretty well at editing code. I probably won't pay for OpenAI access forever, though. https://aider.chat/docs/llms.html says that Gemini 1.5 Pro can be accessed for free and works decently, so maybe I'll give that a try next.

The git integration is useful, but I don't really like that Aider will commit to my current branch to make it easy to undo its changes. I like changes being easy to undo, but I don't really want to have to squash these changes before pushing. I disabled the auto commits, and now I just have to make sure that I don't let Aider run wild on any file with a bunch of changes on it.

Maybe the automatic commits work for others' workflow, but it won't work for mine. I'll keep playing with this because it seems really cool.

hn8726 2 months ago

This looks actually useful. It pains me to no end how there's no real, useful integration with an IDE like IntelliJ. Most AI plugins/tool implement a chat, autocomplete, and maybe some actions like explaining bits of code.

Cursor is going the right way — suggesting caret movements, or editing relevant parts of the file automatically. But it's a completely separate app, based on VSCode, and it just doesn't cut it for working with Java.

I'd pay serious money for an IJ plugin that actually helps me — monitors warnings and proactively suggests fixes, performs edits on relevant bits of code elsewhere after I make a change, or integrates with refactoring tools. I'm sure the possibilities are endless, yet even Jetbrains' own plugin is incredibly basic

replwoacause 2 months ago

Aider looks awesome. I continue seeing good things about it but I’ve only used Cline and have been very impressed. Does Aider do something similar? Is it different or better somehow?

  • hboon 2 months ago

    I have been using Aider for a while but not Cline. It looks like Cline has more functionality but I am have been pretty satisfied with Aider. I like the simplicity. I use Neovim instead of VS Code, so couldn't quite get into Cursor.

    You originally/usually run Aider from the cli, but with this new feature, you can insert instructions and notes into the code as comments which will be acted on. This is similar to Cursor's select code+Cmd K.

thomascountz 2 months ago

Are people using Aider alongside using Zed's Assistant? What are your workflows?

  • chewz 2 months ago

    Open Zed's terminal and run aider there...

    I have aider configured with mix of Anthropic and Deepseek models.

    Zed's setting "working_directory": "current_project_directory",

    Added some additional instruction for models and set it via local .aider.conf.yml

    ``` read: CONVENTIONS.md ```

    I don't use Zed's Assistant Panel much.