Didn't want to burn tokens for small coding tasks, tried to build my own coding assistant..

I am a freelancer. I have been into applied ai and mostly use python. I don’t always want to rely on expensive plans(Claude code etc). Also I don't like yolo philosophy where you generate a lot of code at once. I prefer doing step-by-step code generation, minor edits or generation.

I tried aider, liked it somewhat but i also tried to build a minimal terminal based tool so i edit one file at a time, provide file and/or web context(docs) when needed. I am focusing on python for now.

I feel context is the key and if I can directly provide it without having the agent to iterate and figure things out, I can save costs for smaller tasks. I know speed wise it falls behind things like claude code and may be those tools can give a perfect result after several iterations but I have more control and for small projects i guess it is fine.. Still early and can be buggy, but it has been useful and i use gpt-5.4-mini which is cheaper.

However before i try to improve it more, I would love to have feedback and suggestions? Is it worth it? Or should i stick to aider..I have some more things in mind(support for jupyter, graph) but not sure if it is worth it continuing with it..just tried a poc..Make sure to comment if you find this interesting.