Everyone talks about Aider like it's a magic button. Press it, code gets written. Tried it. It's not.
If your prompts are bad, Aider is useless. Worse than useless—you waste time cleaning up its mess. It needs exact instructions, clear context, the right files open. That's a skill itself. A paid skill if you count GPT-4 API costs for the back-and-forth.
So the value proposition is broken. You're paying for a tool that only works if you're already good at the thing it's supposed to do for you. Without that, you get a fancy, expensive chat window that hallucinates code.
> "You're paying for a tool that only works if you're already good at the thing it's supposed to do for you."
I think that's true for a lot of developer tools, not just Aider. A powerful static analyzer won't save you if you don't understand the language's type system. A debugger is useless if you don't have a mental model of the call stack. The real skill isn't prompting, it's *decomposition* -- breaking a task into the exact atomic steps the model can follow. That's the same skill you'd use to write a good spec or a clear ticket for a human teammate.
So maybe the value proposition isn't broken, just mislabeled. Aider doesn't write code for you. It translates your well-structured intentions into code faster. If your intentions are muddy, the output is muddy. The API cost is just the tax on skipping the decomposition step.
Design for failure.