I have prepared PR for the changes required on the aider side. Happy to start the discussion about the possible improvements.

Companion should introduce communication between aider and IDE, so there are additional open feature possibilities of using it in the future (e.g. adding a selected code to the aiders chat, invoking Refactor command on selected code...)

This is an interesting and cool idea. I like it. It's a different spin on something I also just suggested to improve the workflow and adding files to the chat: #2068

There is a VSCode extension that already does this without a rest API. This could be a good way for Jetbrains IDEs and others, but it's generally not the best case solution

@sengokudaikon
Thanks, I checked the extension. It is running aider inside the IDE, which makes it possible to manage /add, /drop automatically. For Idea there also is a similar plugin that integrates aider directly into the IDE. I actually find it better to have it separated from IDE, so that's why I have chosen this approach. Currently IDE extension provides Rest API which aider should be able to use, but I am starting to lean towards the idea of having aider have it's own Rest API for the commands it provides and the external application integrating with aider would be able to use that. The only problem I can I usually have multiple instances of aider running for different projects at once and that would make it harder to manage connections as you would need multiple ports (or having API server running on top of aider instances).

I am interested in Paul's take on this and see what he thinks would be the best approach given his general overview and idea of aider's capabilities.

I would also very much prefer to have aider provide REST endpoints for its commands. This would open up a few use cases and ideally extend its scriptability without the need to fork it or run it from python.

I would also very much prefer to have aider provide REST endpoints for its commands. This would open up a few use cases and ideally extend its scriptability without the need to fork it or run it from python.

+1 to this. The biggest issue using Aider vs. an in IDE solution like Cursor is the inability to "apply" individual proposed edits while looking at the file itself. Sometimes models end up rewriting too much of a file, or tweaking them unncessarily.