Copy/paste with web chat

Copy/paste with web chat

Working with an LLM web chat

Aider can connect to most LLMs via API and works best that way. But there are times when you may want to work with an LLM via its web chat interface:

• Workplace policies may limit your LLM usage to a proprietary web chat system.
• The web chat LLM may have access to unique context or may have been specially fine tuned for your task.
• It may be cost prohibitive to use some models via API.
• There may not be an API available.

Aider has features for working with an LLM via its web chat interface. This allows you to use the web chat LLM as the "big brain code architect" while running aider with a smaller, cheaper LLM to actually make changes to your local files.

For this "file editor" part of the process you can run aider with many open source, free or very inexpensive LLMs. For example, the demo video above shows aider using DeepSeek to apply the changes that o1-preview is suggesting in the web chat.

Copy aider's code context to your clipboard, paste into the web UI

The /copy-context <instructions> command can be used in chat to copy aider's code context to your clipboard. It will include:

• All the files which have been added to the chat via /add.
• Any read only files which have been added via /read.
• Aider's repository map that brings in code context related to the above files from elsewhere in your git repo.
• Some instructions to the LLM that ask it to output change instructions concisely.
• If you include <instructions>, they will be copied too.

You can paste the context into your browser, and start interacting with the LLM web chat to ask for code changes.

Paste the LLM's reply back into aider to edit your files

Once the LLM has replied, you can use the "copy response" button in the web UI to copy the LLM's response. Back in aider, you can run /paste and aider will edit your files to implement the changes suggested by the LLM.

You can use a cheap, efficient model like GPT-4o Mini, DeepSeek or Qwen to do these edits. This works best if you run aider with --edit-format editor-diff or --edit-format editor-whole.

Copy/paste mode

Aider has a --copy-paste mode that streamlines this entire process:

• Whenever you /add or /read files, aider will automatically copy the entire, updated code context to your clipboard. You'll see "Copied code context to clipboard" whenever this happens.
• When you copy the LLM reply to your clipboard outside aider, aider will automatically notice and load it into the aider chat. Just press ENTER to send the message and aider will apply the LLMs changes to your local files.
• Aider will automatically select the best edit format for this copy/paste functionality. Depending on the LLM you have aider use, it will be either editor-whole or editor-diff.

Terms of service

Be sure to review the Terms Of Service of any LLM web chat service you use with these features. These features are not intended to be used in violation of any service's Terms Of Service (TOS).

Aider's web chat features have been designed to be compliant with the terms of service of most LLM web chats.

There are 4 copy/paste steps involved when coding with an LLM web chat:

1. Copy code and context from aider.
2. Paste the code and context into the LLM web chat.
3. Copy the reply from the LLM web chat.
4. Paste the LLM reply into aider.

Most LLM web chat TOS prohibit automating steps (2) and (3) where code is copied from and pasted into the web chat. Aider's --copy-paste mode leaves those as 100% manual steps for the user to complete. It simply streamlines steps (1) and (4) that are interactions with aider, and which should not be under the scope of an LLM web chat TOS.

If you are concerned that the automatic interactions with aider in steps (1) and (4) may be problematic with respect to your LLM web chat provider's TOS, you can forego --copy-paste mode. Instead, manually use the /copy-context and /paste commands if that will keep you in compliance.

Again, do not use these features in violation of any service's Terms Of Service.