Re: [PATCH 1/4] agents: add unified agent coding assistant configuration

Kevin Hilman
2025-08-08T18:07:34Z

Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 5:06 PM Kevin Hilman <khilman@kernel.org> wrote:
>>
>> Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org> writes:
>>
>> > Create a single source of truth for agent instructions in
>> > Documentation/AI/main.md with symlinks for all major coding
>> > agents:
>> > - CLAUDE.md (Claude Code)
>> > - .github/copilot-instructions.md (GitHub Copilot)
>> > - .cursorrules (Cursor)
>> > - .codeium/instructions.md (Codeium)
>> > - .continue/context.md (Continue)
>> > - .windsurfrules (Windsurf)
>> > - .aider.conf.yml (Aider)
>>
>> This doesn't work for aider, probably because the .md it links to is not
>> YAML. When I start aider with this, I get:
>>
>> aider: error: Couldn't parse config file: while scanning a simple key
>> in "/work/kernel/linux/.aider.conf.yml", line 3, column 1
>> could not find expected ':'
>> in "/work/kernel/linux/.aider.conf.yml", line 4, column 1
>>
>> Not related to this series, but related to aider... I'm curious if
>> anyone has got aider to work with the kernel repo. It seems to have
>> problems with large repos. When starting in the kernel, I get:
>>
>> Unable to list files in git repo: cannot close exported pointers exist
>> Is your git repo corrupted?
>> Unable to read git repository, it may be corrupt?
>> cannot close exported pointers exist
>>
>> but neither claude nor gemini-cli have any problems with the same repo.
>>
>> The aider FAQ[1] mentions using .aiderignore to ignore parts of the
>> repo, but even with an "ignore everything" rule, I get the same error,
>> so something seems wrong with aider and large repos.
>
> It worked for a bit for me, but then aider fell over after a while and
> refused to run with errors accessing git. Some suggestions to repack
> the repo didn't help. In the end, I just ran it without any git
> awareness.

Do you mean just using the --no-git option to aider?

Kevin