aider is an open-source AI coding assistant. Like many open-source tools in this space, aider doesn’t have direct IDE integration but is started as a CLI in the terminal. aider is interesting because it provides a chat interface with write access to the codebase across multiple files, whereas many of the coding assistant products today either only read the code or can change only one file at a time. This allows aider to help you implement concepts that stretch over multiple files (e.g., "add locators to my HTML and also use those in my functional test") and to create new files and folder structures in the codebase (e.g., "create a new component similar to the one in folder X"). As aider is open source and not a hosted product, you have to bring your own OpenAI or Azure OpenAI API key to use it. On the one hand, this can be great for occasional use because you only have to pay per use. On the other hand, aider does seem to be quite chatty in its interactions with the AI API, so keep an eye on request costs and rate limits when using it.
