Run Aider locally on Mac.

Step 2 · Pre-flight memory check

Will your Mac fit it?

Aider pairs best with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B at Q4_K_M (~19.0 GB). Add ~4–8 GB on top for the agent's working set, plus headroom for the rest of your dev stack. Recommended: 48 GB Mac (minimum 24 GB).

$ devpulse ai --before-load 19456 --auto-clean
before: Won't fit — 6.4 GB short
  - unloaded idle ollama model: qwen2.5:7b (4.2 GB)
  - killed 4 zombie procs (612 MB reclaimed)
after:  Fits comfortably — 3.1 GB headroom

# safe to launch
$ # start Aider

Why this matters: Fully agentic + large model = real OOM risk. Pre-flight every launch.

Step 3 · Babysit long sessions

Don't lose progress to OOM mid-task.

Agent runs that span hours hit memory pressure as context grows. devpulse babysit watches and auto-cleans without crashing the session.

# in another tmux pane
$ devpulse babysit --target-free-mb 8192 --json > aider.log &

# emits NDJSON tick / cleanup events you can checkpoint on:
{"event":"tick","tickNum":47,"availableForAIMB":7200,"pressure":"free<8192MB",...}
{"event":"cleanup","reasons":"free<8192MB","reclaimedMB":5400,...}

Tips for Aider

What we've learned running it.

• Aider's `--map-tokens` flag controls how much of your repo it loads — bigger map = more memory
• For long refactor sessions, run `devpulse babysit --duration 240 --json` in another tmux pane
• Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B is the community-recommended local pairing for Aider

Recommended models

Best local pairings for Aider.

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