This was such a useful post, thank you have an upvote! I forgot about Aider.

I was looking into it but got distracted with other work, do you know if it does have any update checks or telemetry? I will check the source but I could miss something so I definitely want to ask people who have used it.

I think I also looked into Continue very briefly. I'm glad you put thos notes about it being more the IDE experience. Also for this one, does it come with instructions on a Github page or something on how to kill all spying/telemetry?

Thanks again!