[anotherpaulg]

My open source tool aider [0] has long offered an "AI pair programming" workflow that is similar but not identical to Copilot Workspaces.

Aider is more of a collaborative chat, where you work with the LLM interactively asking for a sequence of changes to your git repo. The changes can be non-trivial, modifying a group of files in a coordinated way.

Workspaces seems more agentic. You need to do a bunch of up-front work to (fully) specify the requirements. Even with a perfectly formulated request, agents often go down wrong paths and waste a lot of time and token costs doing the wrong thing.

That's also not how I code personally. My process is usually more iterative.

Another big difference compared to Workspaces is that aider is primarily a CLI tool. Although I just released an experimental browser UI [1] yesterday, making it more approachable for folks who are not fully comfortable on the command line.

[0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

[1] https://aider.chat/2024/05/02/browser.html