Sometimes I feel like people online hate all their coworkers. Thankfully, such people have not been highly represented amonst those I've worked with.
AI doesn't make that very easy if you're just two people staring at an agent, but I think a lot of people who aren't already senior are going to hit a wall they can't climb when their experience limits what they are capable of doing with AI.
As with many things, usually the bad experiences with collaborative methods come from a specific implementation and those experiences become the bias.
But, it’s not 2x. Companies are cheap, they don’t want to pay for it.
But I agree with OP that when comes the time of sitting down and writing the code, it is a solo activity. I want to lock in and not see multiplayer cursors or avatars popping up around the editor. The part before and after that are for collaboration, but writing your piece of the code is (or at least I like it to be) solo.
I cannot stand pair programming, but I don't begrudge that it might work for some.
All of these are reviewed before commit.
The 'interrupting' while coding is the shitty part (I agree with you), not having someone working with you.
- antisocial people
- larpers and students and shit who don’t even have a job where they write code but comment like they do
- people who don’t do shit for 3/4 of the day and don’t want to be accountable for that
- people who work with too many idiots
Probably lots of other reasons. Personally I think it’s fun and useful, but I wouldn’t want to do it exclusively. Maybe scheduled hours a couple times a week. LLM aided development can be very similar experience.
Also a great teaching tool.
Big part of my job currently is taking slop level Pinocchio prototypes and turning them into a real boy. I’ve decided that I’d much rather have all of the conversations these people have had with Claude when creating the project than the final code artifacts. Hopefully we get more tooling in that direction.
ANTISOCIAL people doesn't care about society, are harmful towards other people, break laws, etc.
Dictionary definition #1 from dictionary.com for “antisocial”
> unwilling or unable to associate in a normal or friendly way with other people.
Furthermore, were you or the original pedant actually confused by what I meant? I seriously doubt it.
I've definitely used the live sharing session with VS Code in the past to help coworkers debug or give them some suggestions for how to structure things (usually giving Rust pointers to people newer to the language). I haven't done it in a while though, probably because nowadays people will just ask their agent rather than me.
Are we the only ones with this issue? Pair programming is unusable to us with VSC because of this.
I've never desired to have two people working on the same file at the same time during a debugging/teaching session.
We can just work together, talking and writing code. Works great with people you work well with and are aligned with.
I have zed installed, but honestly I still use SublimeText as my primary editor. Zed feels opinionated and hard to customise.
But good for them, surely some company will pay for their services.
At my work 20 people are changing the same wiki-page when we do heavy regression tests. Works like a charm (not everyone is writing at the same place in the document since we are testing different things and writing results at different sections).
Uh yeah, it works amazingly well. I've done entire uni projects with Google Docs and it went great, and was much more convenient than whatever we did before using Google Docs
Which is another thing that just does not compute in my mind as a concept, much like pair programming. Probably for the same reasons. That said, it's obviously very situational and personality-dependent.
When it's working I think it's absolutely great. Together we find the best solution in the fastest time with less errors along the way. I'm also less sloppy and more focused when someone constantly sees my work and vice versa. At the end of the day you can celebrate what you've done, both feel responsible for the work and knows exactly how it works.
The problem is you need to fully trust your collaborators, and that's really hard to find in this industry. Most people never find it. I haven't.
I've seen it though. It exists. Very rare. I know two guys who used to participate in Ludum Dare over 10 years ago who would have loved something like Zed if it existed back then.
By contrast, at your 9-5 where you don't know if your coworker is gonna stab you in the back for a promotion (which I suspect is most people in the comments here) then Zed is probably not a great tool. Git would be a better fit for that. After all it was made to develop Linux, which is one of the lowest-trust collaborative environments out there.
I agree, I don't think people are going to remotely pair-prog with this when it's existed in the past and most work on their own and let their pull requests do the talking.
But I say non-code and planning because I've definitely strategized with AI before and have scrapped a good chunk of it because I overlooked details that my team shared. Being able to get that on an active session with context shared across all members as it's debated sounds good and would've reduced turnaround time.
I remember the Opencode folks mention about gangprompting before and I guess this is one take of it, besides adding an Opencode bot on Slack and hoping that's competent enough for the work that needs doing. I've never tried it myself, so I'm not gonna criticize it, but I'm sure it's an idea people want to see if it's effective.
My personal experience is, of course, not representative of an entire industry, but I just have a hard time imagining it being a common thing. I like working with other people and helping juniors sort out their problems, but I'd quit my job if I had to take turns writing code while someone else watched and just sitting and watching someone else writing code. Both of those things seem horrible, to me.
'course we only did it for like 5 min to get him over the hump.
I think that's the only use case. It sucks having someone hover over you otherwise.
I find that to be a much more promising route than Delta's straight-up multiplayer development on the same task. (Vibe-kanban did fail but I don't think their idea was wrong, but rather the execution- they didn't differentiate enough from straightup Github and Jira boards when that was easily possible, just centralize the agents along with the board.)
Not that two people being able to look at the same agent at the same time is bad though, it's probably amazing for pair programming especially in a remote work setting. It just shouldn't be the main point of a product.
I also think that Delta's codebase replication approach is just flawed in general. Why would you build a remote server just to sync the codebase between multiple developer's laptops when you can just put said codebase on said server in the first place? No expensive sync is needed and all you need is to do remote multiplayer access at the UI level, and everyone gets to work happily on the same codebase and talk to the same agent at the same time.
Instead of the two players having their own base, they are running a shared base against a single bot. This makes it challenging as now the players are forced to communicate, or one can sandbag, but overall adds a bit of complexity. Though a shared base should allow one player to manage one aspect of the game while the other player manages the other aspect; such as building units and the base, while the other player navigates or harasses the bot.
It is possible to logically work together to get a better outcome, but the tools we have currently don't support that. I find this multiplayer approach intriguing as with the right formula could unlock a nice super power. As I would imagine having twice the mental bandwidth available such that more things are noticed or caught or imagined...
I would focus on the economy and my brother would do the military and fight the bots.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/19940901/teaming-up-...
I could see it being useful if you're helping someone debug something, but chances are it's easier just to screenshare.
I mean, even if it is a single player game, sometimes, you may want to ask for help, or others may need your help. Think of it like screen sharing. You probably don't share your screen all day long, but it is a really helpful feature when you need it.
Back to Claude.
I even worked on a team where one engineer loved the idea and championed doing it as early as 2013. Most of these IDE extensions didn't exist back then. He ended up picking a buddy, and they moved to the same office, hooked 2 keyboards and 2 mice into the same PC and spend literally the entire day alternating who's writing code in the same IDE.
I think the concept was supposed to be about helping developers share their skills. Every developer has an experience of looking over somebody's shoulder and having an "oh shit, I didn't realize there is a shortcut/tool/command for that" moment. And the idea with multi-player programming is to get you to see that and learn from it more. But. It. Doesn't. Work.
"You newer models are happy scraping the shit... because you've never seen a miracle"
Never found a use for this sort of thing once novelty wore off. :/
Also see: https://subethaedit.net/