aider

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 3 years (2024–2026), in 13 threads.

People raised many different problems with aider, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 14 complaints

Unpleasant to use, with too much busywork for the user2026-03-16
Must manually add 15-30 files and easily misses some2025-08-02
Agentic coding tool feels clunky and integrates poorly compared to Cursor2025-07-05
Must constantly add files manually and parse awkward console output2025-05-19
AI gets code 40-85% right, so user must wrestle with it and fix the rest2025-05-08
Interface is slow and clunky to use2025-04-17
Tool was super slow and produced subpar code, so the user gave up on it2025-03-10
Aider is more annoying to use and set up than alternatives2025-03-10
Applies edits to every matching occurrence in the file, so changes land in the wrong places2025-01-12
Default mode auto-commits code changes, which the user finds counter-intuitive2024-10-31
Still not ideal UX compared to having it in the IDE2024-10-04
When context runs out, the tool dumps the user back to the main prompt2024-09-14
Installing via Python packaging is terrible, breaking the Mac until the OS is reinstalled2024-08-22
AI coding tools make a mess of existing codebases, forcing repeated rollbacks and re-prompting2024-01-02