Aide

Aide executes autonomous edits across multiple files within a project by maintaining full project context as it operates. Built as a VS Code fork, it integrates directly with the editor's file system API and command palette, allowing the agent to read project structure, understand file dependencies, and apply coordinated changes across the codebase without requiring manual file-by-file navigation. The agent uses Claude Sonnet 3.5 inference with test-time scaling to reason about cross-file impacts before executing edits.

Aide can autonomously execute terminal commands within the project environment to run tests, build systems, install dependencies, and diagnose issues. The agent observes command output and uses it to inform subsequent decisions, creating a feedback loop where execution results guide the next action. This enables the agent to validate changes, run test suites, and recover from errors without human intervention.

Aide uses Claude Sonnet 3.5's inference-time scaling capabilities to allocate additional computational resources during reasoning, allowing the agent to tackle complex multi-step problems by exploring more reasoning paths and decision branches. This approach defers planning complexity to model inference rather than explicit pre-planning, enabling the agent to adapt its reasoning depth based on problem difficulty.

Aide can autonomously solve real-world software engineering tasks from the SWE-bench-verified benchmark, which includes bug fixes, feature implementations, and code refactoring on actual open-source repositories. The agent achieves a 62.2% resolution rate by combining code understanding, test execution, and iterative refinement. Resolution is validated by running the repository's test suite and checking if the fix passes all tests without breaking existing functionality.

Aide maintains awareness of the entire project structure, file dependencies, and code relationships by running as a VS Code fork with direct access to the filesystem. This allows the agent to understand how changes in one file impact others, navigate import chains, and make decisions based on the full codebase rather than isolated code snippets. Context is maintained across agent steps without explicit serialization.

When code changes fail tests or produce errors, Aide observes the failure output and autonomously attempts to fix the problem by analyzing error messages, modifying the code, and re-running tests. This creates an iterative loop where the agent learns from failures and refines its solution without human intervention, up to some implicit iteration limit.

Aide is distributed as open-source software that runs entirely on the local machine as a VS Code fork, eliminating cloud dependencies and API rate limits for the core agent loop. Users can inspect the source code, modify the agent behavior, and deploy it without relying on external services (except for Claude API calls). This enables offline-capable workflows and full control over agent execution.

Aide uses Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 3.5 as its reasoning engine, with support for inference-time scaling to allocate variable computational resources based on problem complexity. The agent communicates with Claude via the Anthropic API, sending code context and task descriptions, and receiving structured responses that drive the agent's actions. Model selection and configuration details are not documented.

Aide is built as a fork of VS Code itself, not as an extension, providing deep integration with the editor's file system APIs, command palette, terminal, and UI. This allows the agent to directly manipulate files, execute commands, and observe results without subprocess overhead or sandboxing constraints. The agent operates within the VS Code process, giving it native access to editor state and capabilities.