Hullo folks!
Over the last two days, I've built out support for autonomy in Aider (a lot like Claude Code) that hybridizes with the rest of the app.
It's just implemented as a mode, so you can start Aider with `--navigator` or `/navigator` and ask it to do things.
It's fully able to...
- test out all of its tools, reverting its edits after it makes each one (https://asciinema.org/a/eqnvZ57O7nVWkpc15NYO1tMHx)
- rename just the relevant parts and publish itself to PyPI (
https://asciinema.org/a/9JtT7DKIRrtpylhUts0lr3EfY)
- ship new tools and features in itself
- work in long form akin to Claude Code, in all the ways that that tool does (though I haven't added MCP yet, though someone else has a PR out for that: https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/pull/3672)
I love Claude Code but I really wanted something like this to be open source and tinker-able -- and because Aider is so wonderfully built, I felt that it's nicest to have this functionality in a tool that has had lots of other thought put into it already. Huge thanks to Paul Gauthier (HN user anotherpaulg) for Aider.
Because Aider's already an amazing platform even without the autonomy, it's very easy to interleave the rest of Aider's functionality with navigator mode. That means... web UI, watch mode (just leave a `# make this darker ai!` comment and Aider will do it) voice input, `/ask`, `/code` and `/architect`.
It works well with a variety of models, but I've found Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the strongest that I've tried, followed by 3.7 Sonnet. Fair warning, akin to Claude Code it can be expensive to run. I'm working on various ways of cutting that down at the moment.
Still lots to improve, but I'm using this all day every day at the moment, so I'll continue to update. :)
I never self-post, so this is an oddity for me, but folks have been asking after things like this, so I figured a quick post made sense.
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So that people can try it out, I had it upload itself to PyPI as `navigator-mode`, until (and if!) the PR is accepted. Still use the `aider --navigator` command to run it!
After that I was paranoid, so I ran another session where I asked it, "We published this to PyPI. Can you check the distribution of navigator-mode and check that we didn't leak any secrets?"
It dutifully checked `pyproject.toml`, then went after `MANIFEST.in`, scanned a bunch of files and was able to confirm that (hopefully!) I didn't.
