I have just used both Composer and Aider (through the VS code extension) for the first time and, for the sake of comparison, I have used them to generate the same little app.
I prefered the Composer experience for several reasons:
- Mainly: the changes are better handeled. The diffs are more easy to review and the fine grained accept/reject gives more control.
- Aider vscode extension has still some bugs on windows and it crashed several times.
However, there are a couple of things that were not so good with Composer in terms of user experience:
- Some documentation on the settings would be welcome. I still do not know what they mean even after having tried them all.
- The UI of Composer is a problem. Maybe I missed something but this little window is always in the way and I had to move it around my screen a lot. It would be nice if it could be pinned somewhere on the screen like the chat on the right or the terminal at the bottom for example.
- I really liked the “git auto-commit” of Aider. With Composer, some changes ended up being not ok and it was hard to simply “undo” changes in a bunch of files.
- It would be nice to be able to choose the AI model (which could be different from the one used in the chat, for example).
- Sometimes, a file being changed in Composer would show a “Cancelled” status without any other explanation. When I clicked on the file in the composer UI, I could see the proposed changes but no diffs and no Apply button. I had to copy and paste the changes.