Why is dormant Aider (no commits in 4 months) still the top open-source harness LLMs recommend?

marlene_zw · x · 2026-09-23

A developer noticed that Aider — whose GitHub repo hasn't seen a commit in 4 months and which few people actually use — still tops LLM recommendations whenever open-source coding harnesses come up. Her hypothesis: Aider is deeply entrenched in LLM training data (tutorials, READMEs, benchmarks), so models recommend it based on training exposure rather than current tooling reality. A useful reminder that model recommendations may reflect corpus popularity, not the actual state of the ecosystem.

Related event: Stale Aider Still Tops LLM Recommendations, Raising Data Contamination Questions(3 posts)→

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