I've been using aider at work lately (mostly for Python, once for some HTML/CSS/JS), and I appreciate it when it works well.

I'm not convinced it actually speeds me up, as opposed to my use of Simon Willison's CLI interface for LLMs, llm, for asking questions, transforming snippets, and writing one-off scripts. But I assume it and similar technologies will improve, and I'd like to know how and when they do speed me up.

One thing aider could benefit from is better IDE integration. I say this as a hypocrite, having tried none of the three plugins that already exist for Neovim (my current editor of choice).

That being said, today I made a neat integration of aider's scripting capabilities with Neovim's quickfix-do commands, like :cfdo. Assuming your quickfix list is populated with references to lines of code you'd like to fix or refactor¹:

:cfdo !aider-change % "Refactor all uses of SentenceBoondoggle, so that it takes a numpy array of ints instead of the current strings, tokenized with the huggingface tokenizer 'sandwich-man', which you should instantiate somewhere reasonable if needed"

Requisite is then this script, saved in ~/.local/bin/aider-change or wherever else in your path you'd like

#!/bin/bash

filename=$1
prompt="$2
Only edit this file, don't ask to add any others to the chat."
model="gemini/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25"  # or o4-mini, claude-3.7-sonnet, etc.

aider \
    --model $model \
    --message $prompt \
    --dirty-commit \
    --no-auto-commits \
    --no-analytics \
    $filename

This allows you to automate tedious, yet not easily regex/vimable refactors and changes across large numbers of files². Afterwards, I open git difftool to review the changes, then allow aider to commit them with /commit in a separate, long-running interactive aider session.

How well this performance is heavily dependent on choosing the right tasks and giving the model enough context to make consistent edits in N independent sessions (one per file).

For instance, if you know you want it to use a certain syntax, provide an example of it. You can also run it first on a couple files, then adjust the prompt until it works consistently.

One thing that's missing for me with this is the ability to run the aider edits in parallel. In an earlier iteration of this tooling, I used a bash script with a for loop running aider as background jobs.

Still, I usually have enough to do that taking 30 seconds to go look at messages is a welcome break, as long as it only happens occasionally.