Paul Gauthier's Aider made the terminal and Git repository the center of AI pair programming, automatically editing real files, creating commits, building repository maps and benchmarking models on code-editing tasks.
GitHub Copilot placed large-model code generation directly in the editor, turning AI assistance from a separate research demo into suggestions delivered at the moment developers wrote software.
Under GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, the 2021 Copilot technical preview put Codex-powered whole-line and function generation into a mainstream developer platform and helped establish 'AI pair programmer' as a product category.