JOIN THE RACE

Sign in to save scores, appear on leaderboards and track personal bests.

Home SaaS & AI Tools Receipts Aider vs Continue

Aider VS Continue

Verdict BUY IT BUY IT
The Reality As of 2026-09-11, the GitHub repo has 48,897 stars, 4,945 forks, and 1,860 open issues, with a commit as recent as today — an actively maintained project, not an abandoned one. A "Show HN" post reached 432 points and 156 comments, one of the stronger developer-community receptions in this space. It's also a real, installable PyPI package (aider-chat, currently v0.86.2), not just a GitHub demo. As of 2026-09-11, the GitHub repo has 35,869 stars, 5,360 forks, and 955 open issues, with a commit within the last day. Its original "Show HN" launch post reached 298 points and 103 comments; a later post about its local tab-autocomplete feature reached 53 points and 3 comments — a strong initial launch reception that cooled for follow-up features, which is a normal pattern for dev tools, not a red flag by itself.
SHORT ANSWER

Aider: Aider is a free, open-source AI coding assistant that runs in your terminal and edits your local git repo via chat. With 48,897 GitHub stars and active daily commits as of September 2026, it's genuinely one of the most-used tools in this category, not just well-marketed.

Continue: Continue is a free, open-source AI coding agent for VS Code and JetBrains that works with any model, including local ones. With 35,869 GitHub stars and a high fork count relative to stars, it has real evidence of developers actively customizing it, not just trying it once.