I've settled on aider and vim.

The best experience I've had is to completely divorce editing from vibe coding. Ask the chatbot to do something, then review the results as if a junior developer submitted them - that means diffs and opening files in the editor.

Fundamentally I think these are really distinct operations. I understand why the kitchen sink IDEs jam the genAI tools into their UIs, but I don't think it's necessarily important to link the two functions.

specifically for working better with diffs, I can recommend tmux + lazygit with this keybinding for quickly opening a floating lazygit:

bind-key C-g display-popup -E -d "#{pane_current_path}" -xC -yC -w 80% -h 75% "lazygit"

not only does it allow you to see the diffs, but you can directly discard changes you don't want, stage, commit, etc.

That's an interesting idea! I struggle with the same issues you've mentioned, that space between the IDE integrated option and pure CLI. Your comment sparked an idea of using something like vim or similar where you can edit the config on the fly and reload it. I wonder how hard it would be to bolt a prompt interface to the front to have it build the editor for you?

It would likely quickly devolve into typical editor config bikeshedding, only AI powered? At least for me, maybe someone smarter could streamline it enough to be useful though!

I'm running Claude Code with vscode. With frequent commits I can use the source control tab to get a feeling of changes being made. This helps in spotting changes to files that should not have been changed.

I use claude code + pycharm (when need to check changes, improve something)

Being able to open the diff in vimdiff view (or your editor's equivalent) would be a neat approach. Not entirely sure how to actually implement that.

I’ve definitely had exactly that sort of looping work with Zed, as long as I tell it how to run the tests. Are you perhaps not using one of the “thinking” models?

"It was the first time I felt like I could write up a large prompt, walk away from my laptop, and come back to a lot of work having been done. I've been super happy with the experience so far." - this yet-to-be-defined "happiness" metric will be important moving forward. Apart from Opencode & Leap.new (so far) I still haven't found something where I feel as happy.

I don't know if others share this sentiment but with all these tools/agents coming out, the main personal "metric" I look at when using them is happiness, rather than other more traditional metrics that I look at when evaluating tools.

That's tablestakes at this point. If Zed is not doing it, it's far behind others like Ampcode and rest.

Intellij’s agent, Junie, does that too… and you get a proper UI as well!

Been using aider as my daily driver for a while, just gave opencode a spin last night.

As another comment by the authors said, they're still pretty early days, so there's a lot of missing documentation and functionality; that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge.

Two big differences:

1. opencode is much more "agentic": It will just take off and do loads of stuff without asking, whereas aider normally asks permission to do everything. It will make a change, the language server tells it the build is broken, it goes and searches for the file and line in the error message, reads it, and tries to fix it; rinse repeat, running (say) "go vet" and "go test" until it doesn't see anything else to do. You can interrupt it, of course, but it won't wait for you otherwise.

2. aider has much more specific control over the context window. You say exactly what files you want the LLM to be able to see and/or edit; and you can clear the context window when you're ready to move on to the next task. The current version of opencode has a way to "compact" the context window, where it summarizes for itself what's been done and then (it seems) drops everything else. But it's not clear exactly what's in and out, and you can't simply clear the chat history without exiting the program. (Or if you can, I couldn't find it documented anywhere.)

ETA: opencode will tell you how big the context window is, but not what's in the context (AFAICT).

3. As sort of a side effect of both of those, the "rtt" seems much shorter for opencode: lots of small actions with quick feedback for opencode, vs long contiguous responses for aider. But that could be more how I happened to use it than something specific.

I do feel like opencode's UI is more... "sparkling"? The screen is much more "managed", with windows, a status bar, more colors, etc. Aider is much more like the REPL loop of, say, python or sqlite3.

How is it de-facto other than being the first? What's so amazing? I thought de-facto is Claude Code?

and Claude Code

Like it a lot so far!

After a brief play last night, the biggest feature of aider I miss is more control over the context window -- saying "/clear" to re-start the conversation from scratch, or specifying files to add or remove as they become relevant or irrelevant. Not clear how much or how long files stay in the context window.

The other question I have is whether you use Anthropic's "prompt caching" [1] to reduce the cost of the long conversation?

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...

Would be cool if it could be an alternative frontend for gemini-cli, claude code, acli and the other tui's

> do I have to pay API based costs Usually, yes, you do. However, in this case, opencode kinda cheats by using Antropic client ID and pretending to be Claude Code, so it can use your existing subscription. > We recommend signing up for Claude Pro or Max, running opencode auth login and selecting Anthropic. It’s the most cost-effective way to use opencode. https://opencode.ai/docs/

This ain’t what you asked but I’m using Claude Code with a pro subscription and I get about an hour use out of it before I run out of tokens. Then I spend 4 hours thinking about how to set up my context for the next session.

Also really confusing. I think I finally figured out which repo is which

In my experience, Claude Code is scary good. Gemini CLI is just plain dumb and not worth the time.

author here

we're very focused on UX and less so on LLM performance. we use all the same system prompts/config as claude code

that said people do observe better performance because of out of the box LSP support - edit tools return errors and the LLM immediately fixes them

Best part for me is it's model agnostic. I liked Claude Code, it worked better for me than VSCode Copilot Agent, but Claude was too expensive, so I rarely used it, and the price/friction felt bad when I did.

sst/opencode I can use with my existing Copilot subscription, and select Claude Sonnet 4 freely. I never hit the limit before, and all friction is gone! If Google ever builds a better model, I can switch the same day, and keep my workflows, configs, etc.

Also, with Claude COde I always felt a little mistrust, since theoretically they benefit from providing a more expensive service. opencode doesn't have this misaligned incentive.

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1933561254481666466

ETA: The above link is at the bottom of the original submission's README. (https://github.com/sst/opencode) I posted it without context, and I have no opinion on the matter. Please read theli0nheart's comment below for an X rebuttal.

I'm so confused by this. I saw this post on HN, and then ended up installing the opencode-ai/opencode one via homebrew somehow (I guess I did a google search and ended up on the wrong github). But then sst/opencode is the one that links to the website opencode.ai and I was reading the docs on that website. Which one is better?

Both are go based using charmbracelet's gui libraries. There's actually a note about the project you posted being developed under the charm repo now but it doesn't seem to be public. Maybe they are the same project?

https://github.com/sst/opencode/graphs/contributors

You can configure Ollama by setting OPENCODE_MODEL=ollama/MODEL_NAME and OPENCODE_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/api in your environment variables.

You can’t edit files with Ollama served models. Codex has the same problem. This is not an issue with Aider.

it's implemented in the backend, will expose in frontend soon

I have tried it and it does.

Exactly. And they are great with lots of actually open source tools for developers. Hope this bullshit AI, Claude copycat is forced to change its name.

I think the way we currently work with agents, through a text context and prompts, is just a very natural fit for the terminal. It is a very simple design and makes it very easy to review the past actions of the agent and continue to guide it through new instructions. And then you can always jump into your IDE when you want to jump around the source code to review it in more detail.

On the other hand, agent integrations in IDEs seem to often add a lot more widgets for interacting with agents, and often they put the agent is in its own little tab off to the side, and I find that harder to work with.

That's why, even though I love using IDEs and have never been a big terminal person, I much prefer using Claude Code in the terminal rather than using tools like Copilot in VSCode (ignoring the code quality differences). I just find it nicer to separate the two.

The portability of being able to really easily run Claude Code in whatever directory you want, and through SSH, is a nice bonus too.

It is composable with all decades old Linux CLI tools, which you simply can't do with an IDE.

It also doesn't prevent you from using an IDE at all, but still fits for people with text editors like Vim who doesn't want to use IDEs.

I’d like to think it’s the most extensible format. If you prefer GUI, you can put a wrapper around it but this gives you the most flexibility.