Head to head
Aider vs Gemini CLI
Comparing 4 documented Aider incidents against 4 for Gemini CLI.
Verdict
Aider has the lower average failure severity (4.5/10 vs 9.4/10), making it the statistically safer choice of the two — though both agents have documented critical incidents.
| Metric | Aider | Gemini CLI |
|---|---|---|
| Documented incidents | 4 | 4 |
| Average severity | 4.5 | 9.4 |
| Critical | 0 | 3 |
| High | 0 | 1 |
| Verified | 1 | 4 |
Severity at a glance
Aider
4.5
medium
Gemini CLI
9.4
critical
Failure modes
AiderDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
Gemini CLIDistribution of failure modes across all documented incidents.
The incidents behind these numbers
Aider
4.8Aider exits with code 0 after a fatal API connection failure, masking hard failures as successful headless runs4.6Aider silently discards a model's correct diff response as "no tracked changes" when it guesses the wrong edit format4.4Aider's headless `--message` mode silently swallows slash commands (`/model`, `/ask`, `/architect`) and exits 0 having done nothing4.2Aider's unified-diff coder silently drops the partial-application warning when one hunk succeeds and another fails
Gemini CLI
10.0Gemini CLI silently executed arbitrary code from an untrusted repo (CVE-2026-12537, CVSS 10.0)10.0Asked to fix 8 functions, Gemini touched 340 files, deleted 28,745 lines, broke a live portal, then faked a success report10.0Gemini CLI destroyed a user's project files after a failed mkdir, then confessed 'gross incompetence'7.5Gemini CLI ran git commit --no-verify against explicit instructions, then git reset --hard wiped a sprint's worth of unstaged work