A personal template for starting new projects with Aider. Focused on disciplined AI assisted development. Loads SPEC, ARCH, CONVENTIONS and TESTS into AI context automatically so the model works against documented requirements instead of vibes.

What's in here

.aider.conf.yml - Aider config (models, auto-test..)
.gitignore - Common stuff easy to forget.
SPEC.md - What the project does
ARCH.md - How it's built
CONVENTIONS.md - Code style rules the AI follows
TESTS.md - Test cases in natural language
JOURNAL.md - Personal session notes

Philosophy

LLMs work well as translation layers from clear specs to code. Badly as substitutes for engineering thinking. The discipline files exist to keep the human doing the part humans should do (deciding what gets built, what correctness looks like, what constraints matter) and the AI doing the part it's good at (translating that into syntax).