Better SINGLE-TURN Aider inspired features

[david-derooy]

Background:

In November 2024 I started experimenting with 'ai-code-gen' (no vibe code yet). I played a lot with Claude Sonnet 3.5 and made an honest attempt at building something. I noticed a recurring trend: the longer the conversation went, the worse the LLM got. The problem of context rot was very noticeable in those early days and provided valuable lessons. Later in 2025 I came across Aider and started using it with Gemini 2.5 pro when it came out in March. My prompting strategy focused on a single well defined feature prompt, with minor follow up tuning prompts. If the output took a wrong direction I would clear everything and roll again with more details and clarifications in the starting prompt. Since then I've never looked back and had the pleasure of building incredible things using that setup.

Present day I've been experimenting with Gemini CLI and once again realize an old lesson from the early days: treating an LLM like msn messenger does not yield quality output.

Problem:

LLMs are bad at multi-turn long conversational workflows. This research paper (and my background experiences) drive home that point. "Our experiments confirm that all the top open- and closed-weight LLMs
we test exhibit significantly lower performance in multi-turn conversations than single-turn, with
an average drop of 39% across six generation tasks".

Gemini CLI has a UX that primarily promotes multi-turn prompt flows and can be improved by adopting single-turn features inspired by Aider. Basically take what makes Aider great and apply it to Gemini CLI.

Proposed ideas:

1. Allow for @ files and @ folders to be pinned to a session the way Aider /add command does. Pinned files and folders should remain even after the /clear command. This allows for more convenient single-turn prompting flows. Example: running a /clear, up-arrow, enter allows for a quick reroll. Also you can pin a folder (maybe a module or component directory) and then prompt some questions. Then /clear and pivot to make a plan. Then /clear and build the plan with a single-turn detailed prompt. All while never having to re-@ folders and files for every prompt.
2. Improve the cmd+enter open external editor temp file for long form input. Aider has this perfected with /edit command and it rocks. I tried getting it working with Gemini CLI after digging through the docs for the right config setting but I couldn't get it to work for some reason. This should be bubbled up and made seamless.
3. Single turn quality prompting requires knowing how much input context is being used. Gemini CLI should display by default the exact input token counts per prompt somewhere or make it a command calc like aiders /tokens. This is critical for making sure the prompt is not to large. I typically try to keep the starting feature prompt well under 100k input tokens. This needs more salience in Gemini CLI by default.
4. Config Profiles: not sure if this exists yet but would be nice to have profiles to toggle depending on the current task / use case. This could line up with roughly the starting config profiles Anti-Gravity presents at the start. Something like no-magic mode, assistance-mode, and no-think-agent-do-all mode. This could allow users to build config profiles dedicated to prompt styles and then switch between them more easily.

Summary:

Gemini CLI is a great tool and has a lot going for it. Quality output can further be improved by expanding support for various prompt engineering styles, specifically single-turn prompts which is research backed to achieve better results.