Aider on your own GPUs.

Aider on a served model through its OpenAI-compatible provider.

Protocol: OpenAI Chat Completions
Support: Local models only
Verified: Run against a live warden on 2026-10-04 with aider 0.86.2. A one-word reply and a question about a read-only file in the chat.

Local models only, over Chat Completions. Aider edits through text formats, so the model needs no tool calling. The metadata file only stops Aider warning about an unknown model and sets its context size.

Requirements

Works best with at least 32,768 tokens of context.

Setup

In the console, Connect writes these files with your warden’s address, your key and the model you picked. Here they are with placeholders.

Local models

Point Aider’s OpenAI provider at this warden.

Shell

export OPENAI_API_BASE=https://your-warden/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=vw_YOUR_KEY
aider --model openai/your-served-model-name

.aider.model.metadata.json (.aider.model.metadata.json)

{
  "openai/your-served-model-name": {
    "max_input_tokens": 32768,
    "max_output_tokens": 8192,
    "max_tokens": 8192,
    "input_cost_per_token": 0,
    "output_cost_per_token": 0,
    "litellm_provider": "openai",
    "mode": "chat"
  }
}

Session id per launch (optional)

# Run this instead of `aider ...`: it writes a fresh session id per launch.
SID=$(python3 -c 'import uuid; print(uuid.uuid4())')
cat > .aider.model.settings.yml <<EOF
- name: openai/your-served-model-name
  extra_params:
    extra_headers:
      X-Session-Id: $SID
EOF
aider --model openai/your-served-model-name

Official documentation: https://aider.chat/docs/llms/openai-compat.html (read 2026-10-04).