and what do you do if you value privacy and don't want to share everything in your project with silicon valley, or you don't want to spend $8/hr to watch Claude do your hobby for you?
I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.
If I have to write a prompt as long as Claude's system prompt in order to get reliable edits, I'm not sure I've saved any time at all.
At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.
I haven't used local models. I don't have the 60+gb of vram to do so.
I've tested aider with gemini2.5 with prompts as basic as 'write a ts file with pupeteer to load this url, click on button identified by x, fill in input y, loop over these urls' and it performed remarkably well.
Llm performance is 100% dependent on the model you're using so you ca hardly generalize from a small model you run locally on a cpu.
Local models just aren't there yet in terms of being able to host locally on your laptop without extra hardware.
We're hoping that one of the big labs will distill an ~8B to ~32B parameter model that performs SOTA benchmarks! This would be huge both in cost and probably make it reasonable for most people to code with agents in parallel.
This is exactly the issue I have with copilot in office. It doesn't learn from my style so I have to be very specific how I want things. At that point it's quicker to just write it myself.
Perhaps when it can dynamically learn on the go this will be better. But right now it's not terribly useful.
I really wonder why dynamic learning hasn't been explored more. It would be a huge moat for the labs (everyone would have to host and dynamically train their own model with a major lab). Seems like it would make the AI way smarter too.
> At least you seem to be admitting that aider is useless with local models. That's certainly my experience.
I don't see it as an admission. I'd wager 99% of Aider users simply haven't tried local models.
Although I would expect they would be much worse than Sonnet, etc.
> I'm getting really tired of AI advocates telling me that AI is as good as the hype if I just pay more (say, fellow HNer, your paycheck doesn't come from those models, does it?), or use the "right" prompt. Give some examples.
Examples? Aider is a great tool and much (probably most) of it is written by AI.
Use gemini-2.5pro or sonnet3.5/3.7 or gpt-4.1
Be as specific and detailed in your prompts as you can. Include the right context.