Frequently asked questions

How does aider use git?

It is recommended that you use aider with code that is part of a git repo. This allows aider to maintain the safety of your code. Using git makes it easy to:

review the changes GPT made to your code
undo changes that weren't appropriate
manage GPT's changes on a git branch
etc

Working without git means that GPT might drastically change your code without an easy way to undo the changes.

Aider tries to provide safety using git in a few ways:

It asks to create a git repo if you launch it in a directory without one.
Before sending requests to GPT, it checks if the repo is dirty and offers to commit those changes for you. This way, the GPT changes will be applied to a clean repo and won't be intermingled with your own changes.
After GPT changes your code, aider commits those changes with a descriptive commit message.

Aider also allows you to use in-chat commands to /diff or /undo the last change made by GPT. To do more complex management of your git history, you should use git on the command line outside of aider. You can start a branch before using aider to make a sequence of changes. Or you can git reset a longer series of aider changes that didn't pan out.

While it is not recommended, you can disable aider's use of git in a few ways:

--no-auto-commits will stop aider from git committing each of GPT's changes.
--no-dirty-commits will stop aider from ensuring your repo is clean before sending requests to GPT.
--no-git will completely stop aider from using git on your files. You should ensure you are keeping sensible backups of the files you're working with.

GPT-4 vs GPT-3.5

Aider supports all of OpenAI's chat models. You can choose a model with the --model command line argument.

You will probably get the best results with one of the GPT-4 models. They have large context windows, better coding skills and they generally obey the instructions in the system prompt. GPT-4 is able to structure code edits as simple "diffs" and use a repository map to improve its ability to make changes in larger codebases.

GPT-3.5 is supported more experimentally and is limited to editing somewhat smaller codebases. It is less able to follow instructions and can't reliably return code edits as "diffs". Aider disables the repository map when using GPT-3.5.

For a detailed and quantitative comparison, please see the code editing benchmark results for GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.

In practice, this means you can use aider to edit a set of source files that total up to the sizes below. Just add the specific set of files to the chat that are relevant to the change you are requesting. This minimizes your use of the context window, as well as costs.

Model	Context Size	Edit Format	Max File Size	Max File Size	Repo Map?
gpt-3.5-turbo	4k tokens	whole file	2k tokens	~8k bytes	no
gpt-3.5-turbo-16k	16k tokens	whole file	8k tokens	~32k bytes	no
gpt-4	8k tokens	diffs	8k tokens	~32k bytes	yes
gpt-4-32k	32k tokens	diffs	32k tokens	~128k bytes	yes

Can I use aider with other LLMs, local LLMs, etc?

Aider does not officially support use with LLMs other than OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4 and their variants.

It seems to require model-specific tuning to get prompts and editing formats working well with a new model. For example, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 use very different prompts and editing formats in aider right now. Adopting new LLMs will probably require a similar effort to tailor the prompting and edit formats.

That said, aider does provide some features to experiment with other models.

Azure

Aider can be configured to connect to the OpenAI models on Azure. Aider supports the configuration changes specified in the official openai python library docs. You should be able to 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

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

Other LLMs

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

Here are some GitHub issues which may contain relevant information.

Local LLMs

LocalAI and SimpleAI look like relevant tools to serve local models via a compatible API:

Can I change the system prompts that aider uses?

Aider is set up to support different system prompts and edit formats in a modular way. If you look in the aider/coders subdirectory, you'll see there's a base coder with base prompts, and then there are a number of different specific coder implementations.

While it's not yet documented how to add new coder subsystems, you may be able to modify an existing implementation or use it as a template to add another.

If you're thinking about experimenting with system prompts this document about benchmarking GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on code editing might be useful background.

Can I run aider in Google Colab?

User imabutahersiddik has provided this Colab notebook.

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