I don’t use UI-integrated coding assistants; I live in Aider. Mostly on Gemini 2.5 Pro, sometimes o3—after a while you learn which model shines at what.

I wanted something more agentic (simple things like edits across repos), and everyone kept hyping Claude Code. So I bit the bullet: signed up for Pro (Sonnet-only).

- Loved the agentic behavior—especially for debugging a distributed system (AWS CloudWatch/Lambda/SQS/CloudFormation). That would’ve been a ton of manual copy/paste pain in Aider.

- But the “Pro” subscription hit the wall after ~3 hours and Claude told me to wait “a couple of hours.” Disappointing.

Upgraded straight to Max, got Opus access. Nice—Opus is good. Sonnet, though, was a disappointment: lots of beginner mistakes I never see with Gemini 2.5 Pro or o3, so it just wastes my time.

Then I discovered my Opus quota was gone in under 30 minutes and I had to wait hours or fall back to Sonnet. Paying for something called “Max” and hitting brakes that fast reminded me why I avoid vague quota subs. (Later I learned you can theoretically use Claude Code via metered API, too.)

Main takeaways:

- Claude Code agent behavior is great (and I didn’t even touch MCP yet).

- Sonnet is bad.

- Opus is good—but basically unusable on a Max subscription!?

Question: Is there anything comparable to Claude Code but more Aider-style so I can plug in whatever LLM? I’ve seen some “hacks” to run Claude Code with other models via wrappers, but they feel half-baked.

What are folks using?