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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

Looks a lot like Google Wave. This is interesting for some things but I don't think coding is it, for the same reason that IntelliJ's CodeWithMe doesn't work for pair programming. And apparently one of the guys is a former Pivot, so it's a little surprising.

Pair programming is Two People One Cursor. A critical aspect of it is you're both looking at the same lines of code and working on the same problem and following each other's thought processes.

CodeWithMe (and it seems Zed) is Same Codebase, Same Day. There's no shared focus. You edit stuff, I edit stuff, maybe there's overlap. But this isn't much different from doing separate git commits.

So far the only remote pairing tool I've found that works competently is pop.com.

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Pair programming so often degrades into one pilot and one person just sitting there trying to catch mistakes. When those mistakes are caught they are mentioned taking the first persons attention away and breaking flow.

In contrast how I like to work, with similar level people, is to work at the same feature in the same codebase at the same time. We either sit next to eachother, or have a remote call, where we continuously talk through what we want to achieve. Sometimes this results in one person writing ahead (code, docs, doesn’t matter) and the second sweeping behind it and cleaning it up. Two cursors, one source. IntelliJ even manages to keep authors correctly in git.

The other mechanism is where we work on different parts of the code base at the same time. Either main code and tests, or split across interfaces and implementations. Because this happens on the same machine the iterations are way faster as they are local and incremental.

This basically saves the whole dance of creating branches, pulling/pushing, the fixing typos etc.

With zed you can also share your screen in the editor which makes it a bit better, but still you can't take control of the other machine.

IMO if you only care about coding doing it in the editor is the best approach, you get zero latency and have all the context that you need (most of the times). But if you want to do more, like opening the browser for whatever reason, or teaching how to use a specific cli, etc, then taking control works better.

If you liked pop you might like gethopp.app, which is an OSS pair programming app (full disclosure I am the co-maintainer). Unfortunately because we have chosen tauri for the frontend we can only support macos and windows, but I am working on a solution for Linux too.

> There's no shared focus.

I never used Zed collab, but isn't there an option to follow someone's cursor rather than having your own separate cursor? Zed even has an option to follow the cursor of an AI agent ffs.

I know that VSCode's Live Share allows you to follow the cursor of someone else. However Live Share is very buggy and will disconnect at times, so it's more like a cool demo than a product.

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