alt Hacker NewsI would say that Aider is what defined coding agents. That was at least multiple months before Claude code. I remember seeing a coworker use aider for a hackathon project Adeline November-December 2024 , and it was already decent and pretty close to the DX we consider coding agents to have
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CuriouslyC • yesterday at 12:16 PM
Devin and Cline were the original true "agents" IIRC. Aider was the original terminal "agent" but it was't a true agent, it was sort of a hybrid agentic chat, since it had limited recursion ability (3 turns by default) and you had to configure it carefully to make it consistently take multiple turns in a row.
Aider was missing a key feature: automatically executing code. That write-execute-fix loop was the big unlock.
I believe Aider avoided adding that for safety concerns. Claude Code demonstrated that throwing safety to the wing somehow kind of worked out.