I have started using Claude Dev (an extension for VSCode - https://github.com/saoudrizwan/claude-dev), and so far my impression has been very positive. It’s a full blown code agent that looks for relevant files in the code base, can ask you to run commands and modify files etc.
You use your own Anthropic API key or self hosted model.
It is quite similar but I found aider a bit clunky to use in that it creates a new commit with a huge message being the whole conversation and context. Which can be a good thing of course, but for most things I'd rather accumulate changes until a feature is finished, then I commit.
I use aider with the --no-auto-commits flag. Then review code and do manual edits in VSCode, as well as manual git process. It achieves exactly what you're saying.
Aider remains to me one of the places where innovation happens and it seems to end up in other places. Their new feature to architect with o1 and then code with sonnet is pretty trippy.
I think the default is not to do this anymore (at least the whole convo and chat aren't in the commit). It is strangely scary to have it commit on every change, even if that's probably objectively the right thing for it to do (so you can roll back, so that commits are atomic, etc, etc).
Claude Dev does have a really nice UI nailed down. I was not aware that you could run local models yourself with it, which would be a great feature but kind of obviates the name.
