12 September 2026 Developer tools Issue 7
Aider, the terminal pair programmer that writes most of itself
An open-source coding assistant that edits your local git repository, commits as it goes, and, by its maintainer's own count, wrote most of the code in its latest release.
What it does
Aider lives in the terminal rather than in an editor. You point it at a git repository, describe a change in plain language, and it edits the files and commits the result with a message, so every change it makes is a diff you can read and revert.1
It builds a map of the whole codebase before it starts, which is how it stays useful on projects larger than a single file.1 It takes images and web pages as context, runs your linter and tests after each change, and accepts voice.1
The tool itself is free under the Apache 2.0 license.2, 3 The models it drives are other people's products: the site lists Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek R1 and Chat V3, OpenAI o1, o3-mini and GPT-4o as the models it works best with, and says it connects to almost any model, local ones included.1
Aider writes a lot of its own code, usually about 70% of the new code in each release.
Aider's FAQ, aider.chat 3
Who is building it
The company behind it is Aider AI LLC, according to the project's own FAQ.3 The package on PyPI lists paul-gauthier as its maintainer, with a first release, 0.5.0, on 8 June 2023 and the most recent, 0.86.2, on 12 February 2026.4 The repository lives under an Aider-AI organization on GitHub, and Paul Gauthier's own profile pins it.5
Nothing we read on the site or in the repository says how many people work on it, or whether it has taken outside money, and we are not going to guess. What is public is the release history, and it is steady: the version number went from 0.5 to 0.86 in under three years.4
Where they are
The site publishes its own counters: 6.8 million installs, 15 billion tokens a week, and a GitHub star count it puts at 44K while GitHub itself showed 48.9k on the day we looked.1, 2 The repository has 4.9k forks.2
The number the project is proudest of is the one it calls its singularity: the share of new code in the latest release that Aider wrote itself, 88 percent.1 The FAQ gives the usual figure as roughly seven new lines in ten, which makes the release-to-release variation itself a data point.3
Why it is on AXIS Launch
This directory exists for software that is substantially built with or by AI, and Aider is the cleanest example we know of: a tool that publishes, release by release, how much of itself it wrote. The claim is on the front page with a number attached, which is exactly how we ask makers here to make claims.
It is also the kind of tool the makers who list here build with, and the commit history of this project is the best free education we know of in what building with a model looks like day to day.
The listing is unclaimed. If you work on Aider and want to add to it or correct it, the listing page says how.
Sources
- Aider: AI pair programming in your terminal aider.chat. Accessed 12 September 2026.
- Aider-AI/aider repository GitHub. Accessed 12 September 2026.
- Aider FAQ aider.chat. Accessed 12 September 2026.
- aider-chat on PyPI, release history PyPI. Accessed 12 September 2026.
- paul-gauthier on GitHub GitHub. Accessed 12 September 2026.