Having finally submitted my macOS difftool to app store review, I prepared to do a nontrivial refactor of a mothballed project, which meant I figured I'd be spending a ton on AI soon. Why not let Gemini talk me out of upgrading from GitHub Copilot Pro to GitHub Copilot Pro+?

(who is in charge of the marketing on these names?)

Apparently paying $39 a month for Pro+ gets me $70 of Copilot AI credits which was starting to look attractive after I keep going over my $15 of "just Pro" AI credits for $10/mth by about $15 for months now. And that's with me being careful.

(who is in charge of the marketing on these "prices"?)

Most disappointing to me: If you don't watch what Copilot is doing closely, it really goes insane, bringing in tons of files for context and making assumptions and changes you in no way implied you wanted when prompting. I usually watch its internal monologue closely and cut it off a few times a day to do some emergency steering, admittedly at risk of wasting good context. It can sometimes get into a frenzied context feeding loop and wipe out your budget in a flash.

Anyhow, Gemini turned me on to Aider, an open source (and apparently non-profit) chat-in-your-terminal alternative that requires you set up your own API key with a supported AI provider. So I finally bit the bullet and paid $5 to sign up directly for my favorite LLM to date from Copilot, Claude Sonnet 5.5. That is, and I know I'm late to the party, Aider is a wrapper for LLM interaction like Copilot was before Microsoft brought Copilot into the Visual Studios [sic] and its own Github Copilot app.

Without getting into the politics of AI, TL;DR: Amazing. Aider makes a repo map of your entire project, which is apparently a list of files/classes and methods so it has a general bird's eye view to begin. Then you have to explicitly add which files will accompany that initial context-setting request with /add commands so 1. you don't have to keep adding files to your request like in Copilot and 2. it doesn't go insane spiraling through more and more unnecessary files as it thinks. It also caches context, so if you keep your chat active you get 90% (afaict) off "resends". I'm suspicious either Copilot doesn't do that well or is sending a LOT more context than it needs too.

I'll consider adding an actual tutorial at some point, but it's pretty easy to get started with Aider. Also good is that it saves your chats right there in the repo in convention-bound locations (like .aider.chat.history.md). Then each time you start a new session, though the context starts over (so you're not wasting tokens up and back with dated conversations) the chat is appended to the old file and all in one place.

Unless you want to file manage! Then you name your chat history file...

aider --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5 --chat-history-file .aider.session-images.md

And start it back up later if that's what suits:

aider --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5 --chat-history-file .aider.session-images.md --restore-chat-history

Anyhow, just to say that with all the pricing sleight of hand by Microsoft I have no idea how much I'm actually saving, but Aider did do a good job on a refactor without spiraling out of control. It certainly cut my token use by, let's nearly randomly say, 25-50%, and the setup feels more mature or at least more dev friendly than Copilot's.

I'd heard Frank and James talk about burning up cash-qua-credits on the terminal, and now I guess I get why. Once spun up, it appears it could be both easier to prompt huge changes and more efficient to code like this than with the hand-holding Microsoft stuff.

Unrelated, wow, James is really into AI-generated artwork now on YouTube, huh? I don't get to see that just listening to the podcast feed. Um, interesting.

Labels: ai, claude, hats o' money, visual studio, vscode

How to get VS Code to stop complaining about comments in JSON files:

1. Open your settings as JSON.
2. Add this:

"files.associations": {
    "*.json": "jsonc"
}

I'm not saying you want to do this. You might not. JSON shouldn't have comments. But if you do want to, that's how you do it.

You can also use specific file names or paths there instead of grenading every *.json file into *.jsonc (json "with comments").

Labels: noteToSelf, vscode

Essentially all my life, if I've had text selected in an editor and typed a character, the text disappears (is deleted) and only the character typed remains in its place.

I've noticed VS Code doesn't do this by default for all characters. It auto-surrounds instead. /sigh

If I have code selected and hit {, it surrounds all of that selection with a pair of squiggle brackets instead of deleting it.

(I actually hate auto-closing brackets too. If I type { even with nothiing selected, please don't insert a } I now have to manage. Note that theses are two different behaviors.)

For me, the solution is to turn off autoSurround.

In json:

editor.autoSurround": "never"

And in the Settings UI.

Thank you for attending this sanity talk.

Labels: noteToSelf, vscode