aider-lite

Lightweight version of Aider meant for editing multiple files in an existing repo.

Features

The idea behind Aider is that you can ask an LLM to make changes in code files and it will use search/replace commands so you don't have to copy paste anything.

Compared to the original, this remake has very concise instructions to avoid distracting the model, uses far fewer tokens, and is designed so you can configure it once in advance and then start coding right away after launching the tool.

This tool works best when you have multiple files where modifications often require changing several parts across them. You can select which files to include in each editing session.

Commands

Command	Description
<number>	Toggle a file's inclusion by its index
<instruction>	Send an instruction to the LLM and apply the resulting changes
. <instruction>	Use clipboard content instead of project files as context
opus <instruction>	Use Claude Opus instead of the default model
copy	Copy all selected files to clipboard
copy2	Copy the search/replace instruction suffix to clipboard
paste	Apply search/replace blocks from clipboard to all project files
paste2	Apply search/replace blocks from clipboard to selected files only
clear	Deselect all files
quit	Exit the program

Clipboard Integration

The copy and paste commands allow you to use external LLM interfaces (like a web UI) as an alternative workflow:

1. copy your project files to clipboard
2. Paste them into an external LLM along with your instruction
3. Copy the LLM's response containing search/replace blocks
4. paste to apply the changes

The . prefix lets you send clipboard content (e.g. code copied from elsewhere) as context instead of your project files.

How to use

1. Create an env variable called OPENROUTER_API_KEY containing your OpenRouter key
2. Create a config.json file with your projects (see example below)
3. Run: python aider-lite.py <project-id>
4. Toggle which files to include by entering their number
5. Write an instruction like "Add an API to obtain the list of documents" and press enter
6. Review the changes made by the LLM using something like GitHub Desktop

Example config.json:

{
  "projects": [
    {
      "id": "my-project",
      "basePath": "/path/to/project",
      "files": [
        {
          "name": "utils.py",
          "language": "python",
          "included": false
        },
        {
          "name": "main.py",
          "language": "python",
          "included": true
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}