“o3 plus Aider is my daily coder”
A few weeks ago, OpenAI dropped the price of o3. Because of that, it’s now cheap enough to use as my daily coder.
I use Aider with o3 in Architect mode: which directs o3 to make a plan and then 4.1 to make the edits. It’s a great combination.
The o3 model uses fewer “thinking” tokens than Gemini, which means that even though Gemini is cheaper for total tokens, o3 is less expensive to use overall:
| Model | Percent Correct | Cost | Command | Correct Edit Format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05 (32k think) | 83.1% | $49.88 | aider --model gemini/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05 --thinking-tokens 32k |
diff-fenced |
| o3 (high) | 81.3% | $21.23 | aider --model o3 --reasoning-effort high |
diff |
| gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05 (default) | 79.1% | $45.60 | aider --model gemini/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-06-05 |
diff-fenced |
| o3 (high) + gpt-4.1 | 78.2% | $17.55 | aider --model o3 |
architect |
| o3 | 76.9% | $13.75 | aider --model o3 |
diff |
| gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06 | 76.9% | $37.41 | aider --model gemini/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06 |
diff-fenced |
| gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 | 72.9% | — | aider --model gemini/gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 |
diff-fenced |