I think it would be much more effective if "/help <question>" just redirected users to a search engine. That won't find stuff on Discord of course, which is a good reason to not use Discord at all.

No need to use some elaborate AI solution for such a simple (and long-time solved) problem.

Have you actually used a frontier LLM for this usecase? It’s quite different from a search engine.

In the case where someone asked your exact precise question including follow-ups, you get the same (or better) results from search.

In most cases for a small project, no one has answered your precise question, so you might need to read docs and figure it out. It’s often much quicker to use an LLM here (though sometimes less accurate than the hypothetical matching search result).

As a benchmark, try using an LLM vs. search for answering questions about Nix. I find it to be 10-100x more efficient than searching and reading through the docs (including hallucinations and time spent corroborating, since usually I can validate the answer by running some command). This is perhaps a cherry-pick for LLMs, but it should illustrate clearly why “just use search” is missing the value prop completely.

Search engines are not as good, and in my experience search engines don't help _at all_ with questions, unless the question already exists online (and has been answered).

The moment your question is more than 5 words long you can forget about it.

The interactive help has the full context of the user's current aider session: what they're working on in the coding chat, active config settings, their OS & shell, etc.

Aider can tailor the help response to exactly their question and situation. It also always links to relevant docs in these help responses.

I've pasted doc links in reply to user questions in discord, and I've pasted /help output. The latter is far more helpful, and includes the links as a bonus.

Have you tried to apply for GitHub Sponsors? Kinda surprised to see aider.chat is solo maintained. I keep seeing it as one of the best at what it does. Though I haven't tried it out much. I'm waiting for NixOS packaging of it [0]. Note someone wants aider bad enough they put a bounty on it getting packaged in nixpkgs.

- [0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/330726

I handle this by redirecting all questions (anything that isn't a feature request or a bug report) to the project's community forum (hosted on discourse). Then I wrote and deployed https://github.com/pierotofy/issuewhiz to automatically catch and close issues that are identified as questions. GitHub issues is not the place to ask questions, in my opinion.

Here's an example of it in action: https://github.com/LibreTranslate/LibreTranslate/issues/632

It's been working pretty well.

Thank you for using discourse! It is sooooo much better than discord. I really, really can't stand discord. Searching for an issue or topic is like wading into the ocean looking for a bluegill.