It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them. That's a win in my book. It seems Claude Code does not do that, which is part of the reason it racks up a (relatively) large bill for long work sessions (that and the cost of sonnet-3.7).

I bounce back and forth between Aider, Claude Code, and Simon Willison's LLM tool ("just" a GOOD wrapper for using LLMs at the CLI, unlike the other two which are agent-y.) LLM is my favorite because I usually don't need/want full autonomy, but Claude Code has started to win me over for straightforward stuff. Plandex looks cool enough to throw into the rotation!

My main concern at this point is that I use a Mac and as far as I understand it Docker containers can have pretty poor performance on the Mac, so I'm wondering if that will carry over to performance of Plandex. (I don't use Docker at all so I'm not sure if that's outdated info.)

> It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them.

That's right. To apply edits, Plandex first attempts a deterministic edit based on the edit snippet. In some cases this can be used without validation, and in others a validation step is needed. A "race" is then orchestrated with o3-mini between an aider-style diff edit, a whole file build, and (on the cloud service) a specialized model. I actually wrote a comment about how this works (while maintaining efficiency/cost-effectiveness) a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673412

And on the Docker question, it should be working well on Mac.

Docker containers can be somewhat slower due to most available Docker images targeting x86. If you build for Arm, it should be better.

orbstack > docker on mac