I was also shopping around second class Pycharm (from Jetbrains) extensions till I found Aider+Openrouter (Gemini 2.0 Flash costs at least 4x cheaper than Sonnet 3.7). I keep a terminal in sight to see what its doing, and leave comments `//do this ai` and tell it to act. All other AI assisted workflows feel clunkly now.
Have you tried Claude code? It’s of course more expensive but the terminal UI is fantastic