Connecting aider to LLMs

Aider works well with OpenAI's GPT 3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo with Vision and Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus and Sonnet.

Aider also has support for connecting to almost any LLM, but may not be as effective because of the reduced capabilities of such alternative models. For comparison, GPT-3.5 is just barely capable of editing code to provide aider's interactive "pair programming" style workflow. So models that are less capable than GPT-3.5 may struggle to perform well with aider.

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:

OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo: aider with no args uses GPT-4 Turbo by default.
OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo with Vision: aider --4turbo will use this vision capable model, allowing you to share images with GPT by adding them to the chat with /add or by naming them on the command line.
OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo: aider --35turbo

You can use aider --model <model-name> to use any other OpenAI model.

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:

Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus: aider --opus
Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet: aider --sonnet

You can use aider --model <model-name> to use any other Anthropic model.

Azure

Aider can be configured to connect to the OpenAI models on Azure. You can run aider with the following arguments to connect to Azure:

$ aider \
    --openai-api-type azure \
    --openai-api-key your-key-goes-here \
    --openai-api-base https://example-endpoint.openai.azure.com \
    --openai-api-version 2023-05-15 \
    --openai-api-deployment-id deployment-name \
    ...

You could also store those values in an .aider.conf.yml file in your home directory:

openai-api-type: azure
openai-api-key: your-key-goes-here
openai-api-base: https://example-endpoint.openai.azure.com
openai-api-version: 2023-05-15
openai-api-deployment-id: deployment-name

Or you can populate the following environment variables instead:

OPENAI_API_TYPE=azure
OPENAI_API_KEY=your-key-goes-here
OPENAI_API_BASE=https://example-endpoint.openai.azure.com
OPENAI_API_VERSION=2023-05-15
OPENAI_API_DEPLOYMENT_ID=deployment-name

See the official Azure documentation on using OpenAI models for more information on how to populate the above configuration values.

OpenAI compatible APIs

If you can make an LLM accessible via an OpenAI compatible API, you can use --openai-api-base to connect to a different API endpoint.

Other LLMs

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

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

To explore the list of supported models you can run aider --model <name>. If it's not an exact match for a model, aider will return a list of possible matching models. For example aider --model 3.5 will return the following list of models:

gpt-3.5-turbo
gpt-3.5-turbo-0301
gpt-3.5-turbo-0613
gpt-3.5-turbo-1106
gpt-3.5-turbo-0125
gpt-3.5-turbo-16k
gpt-3.5-turbo-16k-0613
ft:gpt-3.5-turbo
azure/gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct-0914
gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct
gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct-0914
openrouter/openai/gpt-3.5-turbo
openrouter/openai/gpt-3.5-turbo-16k
deepinfra/openchat/openchat_3.5

Or, see the list of providers supported by litellm for more details.

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