Copilot sucks in general in my experience - but decent at finding relevance that's about it. I haven't tried this agent mode - will look into it. There are many AI agents so far seems for AI software development I'm looking towards: https://www.swebench.com/ for benchmarking - RA.AID has yet to benchmark as its quite expensive. But that is a good point I can highlight that difference thank you.
The great thing about RA.Aid is that it automatically iterates until the plan is fully complete. It also finds the files itself - aider doesn't really do that. I still do use aider for concise editing but RA.Aid is excellent for larger changes that require many iterations.
No it used to rely heavily on Aider and it kind of became obsolete. The agent reads/writes files directly now instead of having aider do it. Its a bit faster and lower token costs.