The new Aider-CE fork of Aider is now official (www.circusscientist.com)

Aider-CE, a community-driven fork of the Aider AI code assistant, has been made official after its creator used the fork to land and test dozens of unmerged community contributions while the original maintainer was largely unresponsive. The fork began as a staging ground for fixes and features that sat behind ~1,100 unresolved issues and 200+ unmerged PRs in the upstream project. Tensions culminated when the original maintainer asked the community to stop discussing forks on the official Discord, accelerating the decision to formalize Aider-CE under active, reachable stewardship (a rename — one suggestion is “ComExA” — is pending). For AI/ML developers the move matters because it shifts control of an evolving AI code assistant from an inactive single maintainer to a collaborative, faster-moving team that will merge community fixes, iterate on model integrations, and maintain an active support channel. Technically, Aider-CE is positioned to absorb the backlog of PRs and bug fixes, power live testing (including a webapp demo tested from a single prompt), and improve the assistant’s code-generation and repair workflows — albeit with current rough edges and known bugs. Contributors are encouraged to try the repo, file issues, and help stabilize what could become a more responsive and feature-rich AI code assistant.