It’s not just about saving money or making less mistakes its also about iteration speed. I can’t believe this process is remotely comparable to aider.

In aider everything is loaded in memory I can add drop files in terminal, discuss in terminal, switch models, every change is a commit, run terminal commands with ! at the start.

Full codebase is more expensive and slower than relevant files. I understand when you don’t worry about the cost, but at reasonable size pasting full codebase can’t be really a thing.

I am at my 5th project in this workflow and these are of different types too:

- an embedded project for esp32 (100k tokens)

- visual inertial odometry algorithm (200k+ tokens)

- a web app (60k tokens)

- the tool itself mentioned above (~30k tokens)

it has worked well enough for me. Other methods have not.

Use a tool like repomix (npm), which has extensions in some editors (at least VSCode) that can quickly bundle source files into a machine readable format