PromptWake for Aider

Aider is the only tool here that writes its history inside your repository — which means it is usually gitignored, never pushed, and gone the moment someone deletes their working copy.

How Aider loses history

The history file lives in the repo and is normally gitignored, so nothing backs it up and no clone has it.

<project>/.aider.chat.history.md

Location: Inside each project, not in your home directory
Format: Markdown — readable with anything
Usually gitignored: Yes, which is the whole problem
Copies elsewhere: None

What PromptWake captures

Each prompt and Aider's response, per project
The file changes described in the session
A record kept outside the repository, so deleting the checkout is survivable
Aider sessions in the same timeline as your other tools

Aider does something unusual and mostly good: it writes a plain markdown log of the conversation into the project directory, where you can open it with anything and read it without tooling. Then it does the thing that undoes it — the file is normally in .gitignore.

# every Aider history on this machine
find ~ -maxdepth 4 -name '.aider.chat.history.md' 2>/dev/null

# is it ignored in this repo?
git check-ignore -v .aider.chat.history.md

Why in-repo plus gitignored is the worst combination

Files in your home directory get backed up by whatever backs up your home directory. Files in a repository get backed up by having a remote. A gitignored file inside a repository gets neither: it is not committed, not pushed, not part of a clone, and not in the backup selection anyone actually configured.

So the ordinary act of deleting a working copy — after merging, after a client project ends, when reclaiming disk — deletes the record of how that code was written. There is no warning, because from git's point of view nothing of value was there.

Every other tool loses history to a policy or a corruption. Aider loses it to `rm -rf`, performed on purpose, by someone who was right to delete the directory.

The manual fix, honestly

You have two options and neither is free. Commit the file — which puts the conversation in the repository permanently, including whatever anyone pasted into a prompt. Or copy it out before deleting a checkout, which requires remembering, every time, for every repo.

If you take the commit route, read it first. Prompts contain stack traces, customer names, tokens and internal URLs, because chat feels temporary while a commit is not.

What PromptWake does with Aider specifically

The daemon reads .aider.chat.history.md from each project you capture and stores prompt, response and the described file changes outside the repository. The record stops depending on a gitignored file surviving, and it lands in the same timeline as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and the rest — which for anyone who uses Aider alongside another tool is the difference between a history and several fragments.

npx promptwake doctor
npx promptwake init .