llmo VS easy-chat

Aider is such an awesome project! I didn't know about it until I read this comment. I also wanted a way to provide my code as context from within the terminal without having to copy and paste back and forth. The tool I wrote (llmo) seems pretty similar to yours, although it uses the Textual library and Rich.

https://github.com/knowsuchagency/llmo

I'm really excited to try out aider, thanks for making it!

Hello HN!

LLMO (Elmo) is an AI pair programming tool I created that's become an indispensable part of my workflow.

https://github.com/knowsuchagency/llmo

LLMO is designed to meet you where you are – your terminal. It provides real-time, interactive programming assistance. With its "staging area" feature, you can keep files in the context window and update the AI about your ongoing coding tasks without the hassle of copying and pasting every time you make changes to your code.

Key features include: - Interactive Chat: Get real-time programming assistance directly in your terminal. - Staging Area: No need to copy and paste updates. Simply add your files to the AI's context. - Model Customization: Choose the OpenAI model that fits your needs. - Personality: By default, Elmo loves to make bodybuilding references. You can turn this off through a CLI flag or environment variable

The recommended way to install LLMO is via `pipx install llmo` https://pypa.github.io/pipx/

As a sidenote, LLMO uses Textual which runs the terminal in application mode, meaning that you can't simply copy content as you would normally. In iterm2, you can hold down the `option` key to select text. You'll need to refer to the documentation for your own terminal for more information.

I hope you find LLMO as useful as I have!

You can ask GPT for new features, improvements, and bug fixes and aider will directly apply the changes to your source files. Each change is automatically committed to git with a sensible commit message. These frequent, automatic commits provide a comforting safety net. You can confidently collaborate with aider, because it's easy to use git to undo missteps or manage a long series of changes.

You can find out more about aider on GitHub: https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

I was initially using GPT to generate code snippets with the OpenAI web chat UI and generic ChatGPT command line tools like `aichat`. But that involved a somewhat klunky workflow where I had to cut and paste code into ChatGPT and then back into my source files.

I streamlined my process while developing a children's chat interface called EasyChat (https://github.com/paul-gauthier/easy-chat). I adopted a "whole file in, whole file out" workflow. I would send GPT-3.5 the entire source code of my project along with a change request and had it reply with the modified version of all the code. This approach was way less tedious than cutting and pasting code between the chat and my source files. I had some simple command line tooling to feed source files to GPT, overwrite them with GPT's modified version and display diffs. This workflow was also quite reliable: GPT-3.5 could consistently produce the code changes I requested without getting lost or confused. But it was slow waiting for GPT to retype all the code, and I quickly hit context window limits asking GPT to read and rewrite every line of the entire codebase.

Access to the GPT-4 API really unlocked a lot of possibilities for improving my tooling. GPT-4 is much better than GPT-3.5 at following directions and replying in a stable, parsable format. Aider still sends GPT-4 entire source files, but asks for replies in a concise `diff` like format. Aider automatically applies these diffs to the source files and git commits them with a GPT generated commit message. Aider lets you easily manage which of your source files are "in the chat session" to control how much code you send to GPT-4 with each request. The ability to reply with diffs makes it much less likely to overflow GPT-4's larger context window.

The resulting workflow is quite effective. You can bounce back and forth between the aider chat and your editor to collaborate on code changes. Aider's code changes aren't always perfect, but wow they are great for blasting through boilerplate or quickly integrating unfamiliar libraries or packages into your code. And if you don't like a code edit, you can quickly discard it by typing `/undo` into the chat.

I now use aider as a force multiplier for a lot of my coding. I even use aider to improve the tool itself.

Let me know if you try aider and find it helpful.

I had chat gpt 3.5 build a small web app for me too. I have since been building some tooling for this sort of GPT-assisted programming.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/easy-chat

GPT is significantly better at modifying code when following this "all code in, all code out" pattern. This pattern has downsides: you can quickly exhaust the context window, it's slow waiting for GPT to re-type your code (most of which it hasn't modified) and of course you're running up token costs. But the ability of GPT to understand and execute high level changes to the code is far superior with this approach.

I have tried quite a large number of alternative workflows. Outside the "all code in/out" pattern, GPT gets confused, makes mistakes, implements the requested change in different ways in different sections of the code, or just plain fails.

If you're asking for self contained modifications to a single function, that's all the code that needs to go in/out. On the other side of the spectrum, I had GPT build an entire small webapp using this pattern by repeatedly feeding it all the html/css/js along with a series of feature requests. Many feature requests required coordinated changes across html/css/js.

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/easy-chat#created-by-chatgp...

Another HN user has also released a command line tool along these lines called gish:

https://github.com/drorm/gish

Gish looks really nice. I'm going to give it a try.

It seems like you've been using similar workflows to what I've been trying for coding with gpt?

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/easy-chat#created-by-chatgp...