I loved the idea of pair programming in the first place. The only thing I didn't like is not being able to surf HN with someone over my shoulder.
A lot of the earliest AI tools were sold as exactly that - pair programmers who aren't hovering over your shoulder. Copilot was the first to get it at a passable level. Cursor did it properly.
It's a similar effect - it checks your typos, your semicolons, fetches enums for you. You ask it questions, but can't completely rely on it. You bounce ideas off it, it bounces ideas off you.
No pair programming has been pretty pleasant every time I’ve done it.
AI assisted coding isn’t pair programming as AI never takes any initiative. It’s more like handholding or having someone poorly look up API docs for you.
I wonder how many psychological effects it has that AI-pairing will not have.
The fact that you have to write the f-ing code right now alone changes everything. I guess you can ignore impulses to overcomplicate things much more easily? The code becomes unclever and accessible to everyone on the call?
We are far more productive than any place else I've worked.
> The code becomes unclever and accessible to everyone on the call?
Yep, bullshit gets called out immediately.
> Divided by 4-5 or that’s per person?
Compared to other places, I'd say what took teams much bigger than us weeks or months we can do in a days.
But we have very little bullshit standing in our way, we work in 2 day sprints, but without all this sprint ceremonies. No retros, no standups, no kanbans, no story boards points. It's just "here's a business problem, you've got 2 days go make us a solution". After 2 days we can demo it, and if its good enough then we can move onto the next highest priority problem, or maybe the solution does X,Y and Z but then they decide they'd also like A, B and C we can keep working on it.
We also have our SME / PO on the call with us all day too, so we can get immediate feedback from them as we are dev'ing. EVerything is centered around having little no time between us actually doing the dev work and getting feedback on it. We can iterate really fast.
And because we have multiple devs on the call, we don't need PRs or code reviews.
Some developers absolutely hate this setup though, and just seem unable to code when other people are watching.
This is what real Extreme Programming looks like. Still haven't been anywhere that truly embraces the less popular aspects (pair programming, very short feedback cycles, direct customer involvement).
Some developers absolutely hate this setup though, and just seem unable to code when other people are watching.
It passes with time, but yeah, onboarding some of them to this group must be impossible. I knew some “quantum” guys who couldn’t move while someone watches. Also highly correlates with bikeshedding. It’s usually confidence-related anxiety that should be addressed either way.
I loved the idea of pair programming in the first place. The only thing I didn't like is not being able to surf HN with someone over my shoulder.
A lot of the earliest AI tools were sold as exactly that - pair programmers who aren't hovering over your shoulder. Copilot was the first to get it at a passable level. Cursor did it properly.
It's a similar effect - it checks your typos, your semicolons, fetches enums for you. You ask it questions, but can't completely rely on it. You bounce ideas off it, it bounces ideas off you.
I liked pair programming very much - although it was pretty exhausting the first few weeks doing it.
At first, we did only 2 hours a day increasing the time every week.
Personally, I found it more productive than two people working alone, mostly because of the fact that you and your partner working together:
- Improves knowledge transfer
- Reduces distractions (two people working together are seen as "busy" by others, while one single person is not)
- Improves problem solving
However, not every problem is made for pair programming. Working out an algorithm or implementing an RFC can be a pain :-)
No pair programming has been pretty pleasant every time I’ve done it.
AI assisted coding isn’t pair programming as AI never takes any initiative. It’s more like handholding or having someone poorly look up API docs for you.
> think most of us would have flipped.
No.
At my current job we pair program using a zoom call for everything with the person writing the code sharing his screen.
Sometimes there can be 4 or 5 of us on the call.
We are far more productive than any place else I've worked.
I wonder how many psychological effects it has that AI-pairing will not have.
The fact that you have to write the f-ing code right now alone changes everything. I guess you can ignore impulses to overcomplicate things much more easily? The code becomes unclever and accessible to everyone on the call?
We are far more productive than any place else I've worked.
Divided by 4-5 or that’s per person?
> The code becomes unclever and accessible to everyone on the call?
Yep, bullshit gets called out immediately.
> Divided by 4-5 or that’s per person?
Compared to other places, I'd say what took teams much bigger than us weeks or months we can do in a days.
But we have very little bullshit standing in our way, we work in 2 day sprints, but without all this sprint ceremonies. No retros, no standups, no kanbans, no story boards points. It's just "here's a business problem, you've got 2 days go make us a solution". After 2 days we can demo it, and if its good enough then we can move onto the next highest priority problem, or maybe the solution does X,Y and Z but then they decide they'd also like A, B and C we can keep working on it.
We also have our SME / PO on the call with us all day too, so we can get immediate feedback from them as we are dev'ing. EVerything is centered around having little no time between us actually doing the dev work and getting feedback on it. We can iterate really fast.
And because we have multiple devs on the call, we don't need PRs or code reviews.
Some developers absolutely hate this setup though, and just seem unable to code when other people are watching.
This is what real Extreme Programming looks like. Still haven't been anywhere that truly embraces the less popular aspects (pair programming, very short feedback cycles, direct customer involvement).
Thanks for sharing, interesting!
Some developers absolutely hate this setup though, and just seem unable to code when other people are watching.
It passes with time, but yeah, onboarding some of them to this group must be impossible. I knew some “quantum” guys who couldn’t move while someone watches. Also highly correlates with bikeshedding. It’s usually confidence-related anxiety that should be addressed either way.