Open-source AI pair-programmer that lives in your terminal, uses Git for every change, and works with GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and local models.
Open-source AI pair-programmer that lives in your terminal, uses Git for every change, and works with GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and local models.
Aider (aider.chat) is a command-line AI pair-programming tool that has become one of the most popular open-source coding agents. It runs directly in your terminal, connects to virtually any modern LLM (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 and V3, OpenAI o1/o3-mini/GPT-4o, Gemini, or local models via Ollama and LiteLLM), and edits files across your entire git repository — not just a single buffer. What separates Aider from IDE plugins is its focus on multi-file, whole-repo reasoning: it builds a repo map using tree-sitter to identify relevant symbols and their relationships, tracks context tokens carefully, and applies edits either as unified diffs or search/replace blocks depending on model strength. Every accepted change becomes its own git commit with a sensible semantic message, so undoing a bad suggestion is a simple git revert — no lost work. Aider publishes a public leaderboard of models scored on real refactoring tasks, which has become a de-facto benchmark for coding LLMs. It supports 100+ programming languages, a watch mode that lets you drive edits from IDE comments, voice-to-code via speech-to-text, image and URL context, and automatic linting/testing loops where Aider fixes what your test suite catches. With roughly 6.8M PyPI installs and about 15B tokens processed weekly, it ranks in OpenRouter's top 20 apps. Free and open source (Apache-2.0); you pay only for the LLM API tokens you consume, or run entirely offline against an Ollama or LM Studio endpoint. Best for developers who prefer terminals over IDEs and want a lightweight, git-native alternative to Cursor or Copilot.
The strongest free AI coding tool for terminal-native developers who want full model choice. Competes with paid alternatives on real-world benchmarks but requires comfort with command-line workflows and careful API cost management.
Free
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Homepage highlights support for Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 & Chat V3, OpenAI o1, and o3-mini — all 2025-era frontier models. Usage stats reported: 44K GitHub stars, 6.8M installs, 15 billion tokens processed per week, and an 88% 'singularity' score (percentage of Aider's own code written by Aider). No explicit 2026 roadmap is published on the homepage.
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Pricing and features change often. If anything on this Aider page is wrong or missing, tell us and include a link to the source. We review every correction.
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