aider/examples

What's it like to code with GPT-4 and aider?

Below are some chat transcripts showing what it's like to code with the help of GPT-4 using the aider command-line chat tool. In the chats, you'll see a varity of coding tasks like generating new code, editing existing code, debugging, exploring unfamiliar code, etc.

• Hello World Flask App: Creating a simple Flask app with various endpoints, such as adding two numbers and calculating the Fibonacci sequence.

• Pong Game with Pygame: Creating a simple Pong game using the Pygame library, with customizations for paddle size and color, and ball speed adjustments.

• 2048 Game Modification: Exploring and modifying an open-source javascript repo for the 2048 game, including adding randomness to the scoring system.

• Complex Multi-file Change with Debugging: A complex code change involving multiple source files and debugging.

• Semantic Search & Replace: Updating a collection of function calls, which requires dealing with various formatting and semantic differences in the various function call sites.

• CSS Exercise: Animation Dropdown Menu: A small CSS exercise involving adding animation to a dropdown menu.

• Automatically Update Docs: Automatically updating documentation based on the latest version of the main() function.

• Editing an Asciinema Cast File: Editing escape sequences in an asciinema screencast file.

What's happening in these chats?

To better understand the chat transcripts, it's worth knowing that:

• Each time GPT-4 suggests a code change, aider automatically applies it to the source files.
• After applying the edits, aider commits them to git with a descriptive commit message.
• aider notes each time a source file is added to the chat session. Once added, these files are available for review and editing by GPT-4. The user adds files either via the command line or the in-chat /add command. If GPT-4 asks to see specific files, aider asks the user for permission to add them to the chat.

Transcript formatting

This is output from the aider tool.

These are chat messages written by the user.

Chat responses from GPT-4 are in a plain font like this, and often include colorized "edit blocks" that specify edits to the code. Here's a sample edit block that switches from printing "hello" to "goodbye":

hello.py
<<<<<<< ORIGINAL
print("hello")
=======
print("goodbye")
>>>>>>> UPDATED