Use ScaledThought with Aider

Aider reads OPENAI_* variables, not ST_*, so it needs its own lines in .env.

Paste the prompt above into your coding agent, or run the command yourself in your project's directory. It creates the account, writes ST_API_KEY and ST_BASE_URL to ./.env (mode 0600) and adds .env to .gitignore. Only the US region is open; Canada is coming soon.

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 init --region us --source org-aider

Usage is prepaid, so a new account answers 402 insufficient_credits until its first top-up. This prints a payment link and opens it in your browser; nothing is charged until you pay on it. How prepaid credits work

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 billing topup --amount-usd 20
npx -y scaledthought@0.3 billing wait

Run this in your git repository. It makes a sub-agent key for Aider and writes OPENAI_API_BASE, OPENAI_API_KEY and AIDER_MODEL to ./.env (mode 0600, git-ignored); the key is never printed. If .env already holds another provider's OPENAI_API_KEY, it stops without changing anything.

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 connect aider
aider

npx -y scaledthought@0.3 models --live lists every model live in your region; the examples use deepseek-v4-1-flash.

set -a; . ./.env; set +a   # load ST_API_KEY
export OPENAI_API_BASE=https://api.us.scaledthought.com/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY="$ST_API_KEY"
aider --model openai/deepseek-v4-1-flash

• Aider may warn that it doesn't know the model's context window. That is harmless: it comes from Aider's own model list, not from the API.

• Aider: OpenAI compatible APIs, read 2026-10-10.
• ScaledThought: /llms.txt (the setup protocol) and the docs.