Example chat transcripts

Below are some chat transcripts showing what it’s like to code with aider. In the chats, you’ll see a variety of coding tasks like generating new code, editing existing code, debugging, exploring unfamiliar code, etc.

• Hello World Flask App: Start from scratch and have aider create a simple Flask app with various endpoints, such as adding two numbers and calculating the Fibonacci sequence.

• Javascript Game Modification: Dive into an existing open-source repo, and get aider’s help to understand it and make modifications.

• Complex Multi-file Change with Debugging: Aider makes a complex code change that is coordinated across multiple source files, and resolves bugs by reviewing error output and doc snippets.

• Create a Black Box Test Case: Aider creates a “black box” test case without access to the source of the method being tested, using only a high level map of the repository based on ctags.

• Honor the NO_COLOR env var: The user pastes the NO_COLOR spec from no-color.org into the chat, and aider modifies the application to conform.

• Download, analyze and plot US Census data: Aider downloads census data, suggests some hypotheses to test, tests one and then summarizes and plots a graph of the results.

• Semantic Search & Replace: Updating a collection of function calls, which requires dealing with various formatting and semantic differences in the various function call sites.

• Pong Game with Pygame: Creating a simple Pong game using the Pygame library, with customizations for paddle size and color, and ball speed adjustments.

• CSS Exercise: Animation Dropdown Menu: A small CSS exercise involving adding animation to a dropdown menu.

• Automatically Update Docs: Automatically updating documentation based on the latest version of the main() function.

• Editing an Asciinema Cast File: Editing escape sequences in an asciinema screencast file.

What’s happening in these chats?

To better understand the chat transcripts, it’s worth knowing that:

• Each time the LLM suggests a code change, aider automatically applies it to the source files.
• After applying the edits, aider commits them to git with a descriptive commit message.
• The LLM can only see and edit files which have been “added to the chat session”. The user adds files either via the command line or the in-chat /add command. If the LLM asks to see specific files, aider asks the user for permission to add them to the chat. The transcripts contain notifications from aider whenever a file is added or dropped from the session.

Transcript formatting

This is output from the aider tool.

These are chat messages written by the user.

Chat responses from the LLM are in a blue font like this, and often include colorized “edit blocks” that specify edits to the code. Here’s a sample edit block that switches from printing “hello” to “goodbye”:

hello.py
<<<<<<< ORIGINAL
print("hello")
=======
print("goodbye")
>>>>>>> UPDATED