Step-by-Step Development Environment Setup for AI-Assisted Coding

In this video, we'll walk you through the detailed steps to set up your development environment with all the essential tools needed to start using AI coding assistants. 🚀

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Whether you're a new or aspiring developer or you're an experienced developer looking for a quick guide to getting your development environment setup to start using AI coding assistants, this guide will help you install Python, AI coding assistants (Aider and Cody AI), VS Code, Git, and more.

By the end of this video, you'll be up and running with an environment complete with all the tools you'll need to get started developing applications using AI coding assistants. 🎉

### 🔧 You'll Install the Following Core Tools:
- Python 🐍
- Aider AI coding assistant 🤖
- Cody AI coding assistant 🤖
- VS Code Integrated Development Environment (with some extensions) 💻
- Git (for version control) 🌐

### 🌟 Optionally, You'll Also Install These Tools:
- VS Code Extension Pack for Java ☕

### ❓ Why This Video?
Many of you have requested a comprehensive guide to get your development environment ready for AI coding assistants. Based on your comments and feedback from other related videos, we've created this step-by-step tutorial to help you get started quickly and efficiently. 🛠️

### 👥 Who This Video is for:
This video is for anyone who wants to get going with developing applications with the help of AI coding assistants with minimal fuss in getting a development environment setup. 🌐

### 📋 Notes on Scope and Limitations
It's impossible to cover every tool or AI technology in a single guide. This guide will get you going very easily with 2 AI coding assistants: Aider and Cody AI. Once you complete this guide, you'll likely have the knowledge needed to further extend your development environment - for instance, adding new AI assistants, programming language extensions, etc.

Likewise, given the number of tools we're installing, it's very difficult to cover all 3 major operating systems. So, for the first video on this topic we chose what we believed to be the OS most likely to be used by the majority of developers who benefit the most from this kind of help - Windows. 🖥️ If we get enough interest from the Mac and/or Linux folks, we'll add those videos to our future plans. Let us know with your comments! 💬

### 🔗 Links Used in the Video

If you have any questions or run into issues, leave a comment below! We're here to help. 🛠️

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#AICodingAssistants #DevelopmentSetup #CodingTheFutureWithAI

00:00 Introduction
00:38 AI Development Environment Components
01:57 Installing Python
03:55 Installing git
05:26 Installing the aider AI coding Assistant
08:03 Installing VS Code
09:03 Installing the Python Extension Pack
09:59 Installing Cody AI Coding Assistant
11:17 OPTIONAL: Adding Java Support
12:56 Creating an API Key for the Claude LLM
14:55 Creating an API Key for the GPT 4 LLM
17:27 Wrap-up

[nyacumo]

Great work! I've never come across such a clear and well-structured explanation before. It's extremely useful!

[sunkwolf]

I was looking for this video, but you still dont show how to use it for noobs, really thx, you get a new subscription 😅

[matt.stapley]

Great video. Thanks for the step by step instructions :)

[miiihaaas]

Hello again! 😊 I was wondering if you could elaborate on why you chose to install Cody AI. I have Codeium installed on my VSCode and was curious if it’s sufficient or if you would recommend Cody AI as a better alternative. Thanks!

[rapier]

Thank you! This is just what I needed.

[JunkMail-mnro]

Tim, thx for the nice presentation & encouragement. I came to these videos recently & appreciate your thoughtful and thorough coaching.

I have 3 doctoral degrees, but never made time to learn coding (aside from a brief stent with BASIC back in the day). Is it realistic to use the Aider + tools to build Agentic systems without such knowledge; or, is that just a hopeless delusion? [Id really like to build my own medical transcription/coding system for my private practice.]

Thx, on any account!

[chrisc]

Could you do it for Mac as well please? Thanks

[continuouslearner]

i think camtasia allows you to zoom into (for example) the windows command prompt. Can you pls try doing that, for example the text at 7:18 is too small to read on laptops having small displays. So it would be helpful if you can (post recording, in the video editing phase) zoom in on whatever you the main topic of that current narration is.

[blueGround]

What are you spending on Claude for these projects?
I understand it will vary, just a monthly estimate.
Excellent content and presentation BTW

[umtombs]

just a question, so I followed all of this and created the venv-aider venv, so when doing the tutorials it appears that sometimes a venv is activated and sometimes it isn't. I guess I am wondering is the aider-venv created in this tutorial is used across all tutorials or if this needs to be done for every project. Thanks. I have also joined your skool community.

[sivakumarm]

Nice tutorial. Mac based tutorial would be great 😊. Suggestion - Please dont use mouse highlighter as its interfering the text and unable to see what you are typing sometimes. Also instead of doing screen recording the complete screen you can record a specific area so that it will be easy to read what you are typing from mobile as well.

[techdave]

Just curious, what does aider do beyond just what claude or gpt does? Other than run direct in vsc, which granted, not having to copy and paste is worth its weight in gold. 😊 great tutorial btw.

[darklen]

Side note, if you are following along on a Windows machine and you get an error about recognizing the 'Source' term when installing aider, just leave out Source term.

[bambanx]

Have you tried cursor ai code editor? Please make a video of it, some People use it aing with aider . Thanks you for your well explained videos.

[devGFontanez]

Wonder how much estimated will cost a month for the API consume on LLM? Just for regular day to day coding assist and using these API.

[continuouslearner]

does one need BOTH claude ai and openai key for aider to work?

[pinkpanther]

please tell me what should I do if after I wrote the command
pip install aider-chat
but at the end it says
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils'
What should I do in this situation?

[DavidSegura]

Great by the way how i can open on another time AIDER once instaled with GitBash?

[TreeLuvBurdpu]

`winget install python` works too, but you have to disable the Windows alias for python that points at the Store.

[joeking]

Hi, How did that work @ 3:44 you never clicked the 'Add python.exe to PATH' @ 3:28 when you installed it ???. Newbie to all this and there seems to be a myriad of pitfalls awaiting you ???. With this venv nightmare that is needed with python, when you created that, is the venv created in what will become your project dir where you hopefully AI created files will live when you actually get coding or is it a one folder setup that your projects refer to, or is that done on every single project you create. It's now 2025, you would think these language creators would make this just a little more confusing just to keep us all awake <G>. Thks for vid.