Aider joins Anchor as a drone-only platform

Anchor's scaffold has covered Claude Code and Grok Build for a while — both harnesses with a real slash-command runtime, so a scaffolded project gets the full skill suite (/work, /draft, /review, and the rest). Aider is different: it's usually the harness running a small local model, and it has no slash-command runtime to hook into. anchor --platform aider now scaffolds it anyway, with a brief scoped to what that actually calls for.

Queen-bee plans, drone executes

A small local model is a fine executor and a poor architect. Rather than pretend Aider sessions can safely draft, review, or merge plans, the new AIDER.md brief gives them exactly one job: run /work against a plan a bigger session — Claude Code, Grok Build, or a human — already made ready.

Since Aider has no slash-command parser, the brief teaches the model to treat the literal text /work as an instruction to follow a condensed procedure itself: pick the highest-priority ready plan, claim it into .plans/in-progress/, execute its Steps, run the project's tests before committing, commit on a feature branch, then hand off to .plans/review-needed/ and stop. A drone never merges, and it never asks the merge question /work asks in a full harness — that judgment call stays with a queen-bee session.

What ships

anchor <project-dir> --platform aider

writes AIDER.md to the project root and a tracked .aider.conf.yml.example — copy it to .aider.conf.yml and Aider loads the brief into every session automatically:

read: AIDER.md

Host-specific values like OLLAMA_API_BASE stay out of the tracked example and belong in a gitignored .env, same as every other local-model config in Anchor.

The brief also points a drone at the fleet probe (fit_device.py --probe) so it defaults to the memory-safer model fit on constrained hardware rather than the largest model that only theoretically fits — the same Default for wire vs Max fit split /local-models already reports.

What's next

This is deliberately the thin layer: a brief and a scaffold entry, not a full skills port. A follow-on plan will bridge Anchor's slash skills into Aider's prompt loop more directly so a drone session can run more than /work alone.