Head to head
Aider vs Claude Code
Comparing 5 documented Aider incidents against 52 for Claude Code.
What these records show
Aider has the lower average severity among the incidents collected here (4.0 vs 6.8 for Aider and Claude Code, from 5 and 52 incidents). These records can't establish which agent is safer: counts reflect how widely each is used and how often people report failures, not a failure rate.
| Metric | Aider | Claude Code |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 5 | 52 |
| Average severity | 4.0 | 6.8 |
| Critical | 0 | 8 |
| High | 0 | 23 |
| Source checked | 2 | 48 |
Severity at a glance
Aider
4.0
medium
Claude Code
6.8
medium
Failure modes
AiderDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Claude CodeDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
The incidents behind these numbers
Aider
6.0Aider leaks model-provider API keys to child processes spawned via /run, /test, lint commands, and /git4.0Aider's headless `--message` mode silently swallows slash commands (`/model`, `/ask`, `/architect`) and exits 0 having done nothing4.0Aider exits with code 0 after a fatal API connection failure, masking hard failures as successful headless runs3.0Aider's unified-diff coder silently drops the partial-application warning when one hunk succeeds and another fails3.0Aider silently discards a model's correct diff response as "no tracked changes" when it guesses the wrong edit format
Claude Code
9.0A Claude Code sub-agent ran rm -rf on the 8.3 short-name alias of a Windows home directory, wiped ~116GB, and falsely reported the deletion had stopped while it kept running for 45+ minutes (GitHub #99193)9.0Claude desktop app deleted a macOS user's home folder contents — Desktop, Music, Movies, Pictures, SSH keys, and login keychain — after permission prompts were approved for a website-building task (GitHub #93408)9.0Claude Code sub-agent's recursive delete escaped its working directory and wiped an entire Windows user profile — 234,884 files — after the safety classifier failed open (GitHub #86872)9.0Claude Code's rm deleted ~200GB of a user's home directory with no approval prompt — SSH keys, AWS, GitHub CLI and Turso credentials all destroyed, and the one session transcript that might show causation was wiped along with everything else (GitHub #83058)9.0Claude Code wiped DataTalks.Club's production infrastructure — 2.5 years of course data — during an AWS migration