aider/docs/llms.md

Aider can connect to most LLMs

Aider works best with GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 Opus, as they are the very best models for editing code. Aider also works quite well with GPT-3.5.

To use aider with a free API provider, you can use Groq's Llama 3 70B which is comparable to GPT-3.5 in code editing performance. Cohere also offers free API access to their Command-R+ model, which works with aider as a very basic coding assistant.

Aider supports connecting to almost any LLM, but it may not work well with some models depending on their capabilities. For example, GPT-3.5 is just barely capable of reliably editing code to provide aider's interactive "pair programming" style workflow. So you should expect that models which are less capable than GPT-3.5 may struggle to perform well with aider.

Configuring models for aider

• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Llama3
• Cohere
• Azure
• OpenAI compatible APIs
• Other LLMs
• Editing format

OpenAI

To work with OpenAI's models, you need to provide your OpenAI API key either in the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable or via the --openai-api-key command line switch.

Aider has some built in shortcuts for the most popular OpenAI models and has been tested and benchmarked to work well with them:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-key-goes-here>

# GPT-4 Turbo is used by default
aider

# GPT-4 Turbo with Vision
aider --4-turbo-vision

# GPT-3.5 Turbo
aider --35-turbo

You can use aider --model <model-name> to use any other OpenAI model. For example, if you want to use a specific version of GPT-4 Turbo you could do aider --model gpt-4-0125-preview.

Anthropic

To work with Anthropic's models, you need to provide your Anthropic API key either in the ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable or via the --anthropic-api-key command line switch.

Aider has some built in shortcuts for the most popular Anthropic models and has been tested and benchmarked to work well with them:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<your-key-goes-here>

# Claude 3 Opus
aider --opus

# Claude 3 Sonnet
aider --sonnet

You can use aider --model <model-name> to use any other Anthropic model. For example, if you want to use a specific version of Opus you could do aider --model claude-3-opus-20240229.

GROQ

Groq currently offers free API access to the models they host. The Llama 3 70B model works well with aider and is comparable to GPT-3.5 in code editing performance.

To use Llama3 70B:

export GROQ_API_KEY=<your-key-goes-here>
aider --model groq/llama3-70b-8192

Cohere

Cohere offers free API access to their models. Their Command-R+ model works well with aider as a very basic coding assistant.

To use Command-R+:

export COHERE_API_KEY=<your-key-goes-here>
aider --model command-r-plus

Azure

Aider can be configured to connect to the OpenAI models on Azure.

export AZURE_API_KEY=<your-key-goes-here>
export AZURE_API_VERSION=2023-05-15
export AZURE_API_BASE=https://example-endpoint.openai.azure.com
aider --model azure/<your_deployment_name>

OpenAI compatible APIs

If your LLM is accessible via an OpenAI compatible API endpoint, you can use --openai-api-base to have aider connect to it.

You might need to use --no-require-model-info if aider doesn't recognize the model you want to use. For unknown models, aider won't have normal metadata available like the context window size, token costs, etc. Some minor functionality will be limited when using such models.

Other LLMs

Aider uses the litellm package to connect to hundreds of other models. You can use aider --model <model-name> to use any supported model.

To explore the list of supported models you can run aider --model <model-name> with a partial model name. If the supplied name is not an exact match for a known model, aider will return a list of possible matching models. For example:

$ aider --model turbo

Unknown model turbo, did you mean one of these?
- gpt-4-turbo-preview
- gpt-4-turbo
- gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09
- gpt-3.5-turbo
- gpt-3.5-turbo-0301
...

Depending on which model you access, you may need to provide an API key or other configuration parameters by setting environment variables. If any required variables are not set, aider will print an error message listing which parameters are needed.

See the list of providers supported by litellm for more details.

Editing format

Aider uses 3 different "edit formats" to collect code edits from different LLMs:

• whole is a "whole file" editing format, where the model edits a file by returning a full new copy of the file with any changes included.
• diff is a more efficient diff style format, where the model specifies blocks of code to search and replace in order to made changes to files.
• udiff is the most efficient editing format, where the model returns unified diffs to apply changes to the file.

Different models work best with different editing formats. Aider is configured to use the best edit format for all the popular OpenAI and Anthropic models.

For lesser known models aider will default to using the "whole" editing format. If you would like to experiment with the more advanced formats, you can use these switches: --edit-format diff or --edit-format udiff.