Aider hasn't shipped a real release since February. I need to walk back a recommendation.

I’ve recommended Aider more than once on this site — as a Gemini CLI replacement, in a direct comparison against Cline and OpenCode — and each time I noted it as “less actively maintained than the other two right now.” That qualifier needs to get a lot stronger.

The current facts, as of a benchmark update checked this month: Aider’s last commit to its main branch was May 22, 2026. Its last actual PyPI release, the version people are installing when they run pip install aider-chat, is 0.86.2, shipped February 12 — over four months before this check, while every other agent tracked on the same leaderboard shipped a release in September. Its star count is still climbing, from 45,945 to 49,118 over the same tracking window, which tells you people are still discovering and starring it — just not that anyone is actively shipping code into it.

What still works, to be precise rather than alarmist: it does run with current frontier models, by passing the right flag manually. The core pitch that made it worth recommending in the first place — every edit landing as a real, reviewable git commit, genuinely BYOK, terminal-native — hasn’t broken. It’s not abandoned in the sense of no longer functioning; it’s stalled in the sense that new model releases and provider-specific features are landing everywhere else first, and reaching Aider later if at all, rather than on anything like the cadence its competitors are shipping at.

Why I think this crossed a real threshold rather than just being a normal quiet stretch: I’ve written before about what it means when a fork or a project runs behind its peers — a bounded, actively-managed gap is a different thing than one that’s silently growing. Four months since the last release, with zero commits to main for that same stretch, isn’t a project working through a backlog on a delay. It’s a project that’s stopped actively shipping, even if the code that already exists keeps working exactly as well as it did in February.

The honest updated recommendation: if you specifically want the git-commit-per-edit workflow and don’t need Aider to keep pace with new model releases as they land, the existing install still works and nothing about today’s post changes that. But I can no longer recommend it as an actively maintained option the way I did in earlier posts, and if staying current with new models and provider features matters to you, OpenCode or Cline are the ones actually shipping that cadence right now. I’d rather correct this in public than leave outdated advice standing quietly in three older posts.