Prompt caching

Aider supports prompt caching for cost savings and faster coding. Currently Anthropic provides caching for Sonnet and Haiku, and DeepSeek provides caching for Coder.

Aider organizes the chat history to try and cache:

  • The system prompt.
  • Read only files added with --read or /read-only.
  • The repository map.
  • The editable files that have been added to the chat.

Prompt caching

Usage

Run aider with --cache-prompts or add that setting to your configuration files.

Due to limitations in the provider APIs, caching statistics and costs are not available when streaming responses. To turn off streaming, use --no-stream.

When caching is enabled, it will be noted for the main model when aider launches:

Main model: claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620 with diff edit format, prompt cache, infinite output

Preventing cache expiration

Aider can ping the provider to keep your prompt cache warm and prevent it from expiring. By default, Anthropic keeps your cache for 5 minutes. Use --cache-keepalive-pings N to tell aider to ping every 5 minutes to keep the cache warm. Aider will ping up to N times over a period of N*5 minutes after each message you send.