GitHub Copilot API with Aider

Configure Aider to use GitHub Copilot's API endpoint with Claude Sonnet 4 as your primary model and GPT-4o-mini as the weak model for optimal performance and cost efficiency.

What This Does

This configuration sets up Aider to route requests through GitHub Copilot's API, allowing you to use Claude Sonnet 4 for complex reasoning tasks while falling back to the faster, cheaper GPT-4o-mini for simpler operations like linting and syntax checks.

Instructions

1. **Set your GitHub Copilot API key as an environment variable**:

```bash

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_github_copilot_api_key"

```

Or add it to your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.)

2. **Create an Aider configuration file** at `~/.aider.conf.yml`:

```yaml

openai-api-base: https://api.githubcopilot.com

model: openai/claude-sonnet-4

weak-model: openai/gpt-4o-mini

show-model-warnings: false

dark-mode: true

watch-files: true

```

3. **Verify the configuration** by running:

```bash

aider --check

```

4. **Start using Aider** with your configured models:

```bash

aider <files>

```

Configuration Breakdown

Why This Setup

Requirements

Notes