tl;dr#

LLMs in the terminal.

• aider
• smartcat
• elia
• parllama
• claude code

Aider#

aider is AI pair programming in your terminal. It’s basically a chat interface for an LLM that provides the context of your codebase in your session. It allows you to write comments like //implment this function and use recursion. AI! and it will be picked up by a model of your choosing. It can also answer questions about your codebase and help you plan big changes.

smartcat#

smartcat (sc in the CLI) is a CLI interface to LLMs. In the true spirit of UNIX it does one thing well and is very composable. Can be very useful when working in helix with the | command that allows you to pipe your selection into an external command and allows it be replaced with the output of the command. Allowing you to use a model of your choosing to quickly implement functions.

elia & parllama#

Both elia and parllama offer a TUI to LLMs. You can configure multiple LLMs and LLM providers so doesn’t matter if you want to use chat gippity, gemini, Claude or even run it yourself with ollama.

claude code#

A bit of a last minute addition, claude code was just announced by anthropic as a command line tool to help you code. It doesn’t allow you to use any model you want, it’s always claude. And claude is not cheap, just initializing claude on a new project cost me 6 cents. While my 2 hour coding session with gemini flash 2 in aider cost me less than 1 cent..