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Fix: Aider's /work trigger never reached the model

· 2 min read
Carefree Investments LLC
Anchor maintainers

AIDER.md — the drone brief anchor --platform aider scaffolds into every Aider project — has told operators since it shipped to type a literal /work to start the drone procedure. That instruction was wrong: Aider intercepts any chat message starting with / as one of its own built-in commands and replies Invalid command: work without ever calling the model. A bare /work never reached the LLM, on any model size.

What was broken​

This surfaced during live testing of the Aider swarm drone card (work-drone.md, skills-index.md), which had already been corrected to say "type work, no slash." AIDER.md itself — the brief every Aider scaffold ships, regardless of model size — still carried the original wrong instruction, because the plan that first shipped it verified .aider.conf.yml config syntax against Aider's docs but never actually typed /work into a live Aider session.

The fix​

AIDER.md and its docs mirror now say to type the word work, with no leading slash (or embedded mid-sentence — anything not starting with /). Verified live against Aider 0.86.2: a bare /work still gets Invalid command: /work from Aider itself (unchanged, correct Aider behavior — this was a documentation bug, not an Aider bug), while work or work --list reaches the model.

If you scaffolded a project with an earlier anchor --platform aider, re-run the scaffold (or hand-edit AIDER.md) to pick up the fix.