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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

I think they're trying to implement every management fad with AI agents and see if improves performance.

Personally, I have tried pair programming, and it hasn't really felt like something that works, for various reasons - the main one is that I (and my partner) have complex thought processes in my head, that is difficult and cumbersome to articulate, and to an onlooker, it looks like I'm randomly changing code.

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I worked at Pivotal Labs where hundreds of developers pair programmed every day, all day. It works, the trick is learning how to get out of your head and communicate with your pair in a way that two brains works better than one.

I agree, it isn't for everyone.

Pair programming is like guiding the mechs in Pacific Rim (too bad they never made a sequel).

You need to communicate actively and be in sync with your pair. I've seen it work _once_ with two guys who had know each other since they were kids. They were really more than the sum of their parts when pair programming.

I've had the same experience - I was running a cottage-business with my best friend as a teen, writing a DOS GUI app for a single customer - we did this exact sort of pair programming, and I can say with confidence in retrospect, that we didn't know how good we had it.

We were doing so many things so much better than what Ive seen as industry best practice since then, despite both of us being both very inexperienced and young.

Pair programming works best when you are tasked with a problem that’s actually beyond your current abilities. You spend less time in your head because you are exploring a solution space for the first time.

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