3 items tagged “aider”
2024
Quantization matters (via) What impact does quantization have on the performance of an LLM? been wondering about this for quite a while, now here are numbers from Paul Gauthier.
He ran differently quantized versions of Qwen 2.5 32B Instruct through his Aider code editing benchmark and saw a range of scores.
The original released weights (BF16) scored highest at 71.4%, with Ollama's qwen2.5-coder:32b-instruct-fp16 (a 66GB download) achieving the same score.
The quantized Ollama qwen2.5-coder:32b-instruct-q4_K_M (a 20GB download) saw a massive drop in quality, scoring just 53.4% on the same benchmark.
LLMs are bad at returning code in JSON (via) Paul Gauthier's Aider is a terminal-based coding assistant which works against multiple different models. As part of developing the project Paul runs extensive benchmarks, and his latest shows an interesting result: LLMs are slightly less reliable at producing working code if you request that code be returned as part of a JSON response.
The May release of GPT-4o is the closest to a perfect score - the August appears to have regressed slightly, and the new structured output mode doesn't help and could even make things worse (though that difference may not be statistically significant).
Paul recommends using Markdown delimiters here instead, which are less likely to introduce confusing nested quoting issues.
Aider. Aider is an impressive open source local coding chat assistant terminal application, developed by Paul Gauthier (founding CTO of Inktomi back in 1996-2000).
I tried it out today, using an Anthropic API key to run it using Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
pipx install aider-chat
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=api-key-here
aider --dark-mode
I found the --dark-mode
flag necessary to make it legible using the macOS terminal "Pro" theme.
Aider starts by generating a concise map of files in your current Git repository. This is passed to the LLM along with the prompts that you type, and Aider can then request additional files be added to that context - or you can add the manually with the /add filename
command.
It defaults to making modifications to files and then committing them directly to Git with a generated commit message. I found myself preferring the /ask
command which lets you ask a question without making any file modifications:
The Aider documentation includes extensive examples and the tool can work with a wide range of different LLMs, though it recommends GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet (or 3 Opus) and DeepSeek Coder V2 for the best results. Aider maintains its own leaderboard, emphasizing that "Aider works best with LLMs which are good at editing code, not just good at writing code".
The prompts it uses are pretty fascinating - they're tucked away in various *_prompts.py
files in aider/coders.