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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> I have no desire to do multi-player development in my editor. Never have had any such desire. Coding is a single-player game and I can't think of a single thing that would be improved by having someone else in the same editor.

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.

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I've done VSCode pair programming as well. But since roughly half a year ago, it has been permanently broken. It'll work for a few minutes, then loses sync, and then it's unusable. This seems to happen between many computers (not just mine) and many updates of VSC.

Are we the only ones with this issue? Pair programming is unusable to us with VSC because of this.

during those cases, i've just asked them to give me control over zoom and it's worked fine.

I've never desired to have two people working on the same file at the same time during a debugging/teaching session.

Even if you're not both typing at once, being able to trade off quickly without having to manually pass the ownership back and forth has had value for me in the past.

Can you elaborate? Why wouldn't you just check in your code when you're done your bit instead of working on the same commit together?

I like it because we don't have to do the this dance all the time: * Commit * Push * Say: Now it's pushed * Pull

We can just work together, talking and writing code. Works great with people you work well with and are aligned with.

This feels a bit like asking why I would send my coworkers a Slack message instead of an email. For some things, send and wait for them to look at it is fine, but if I want to have a conversation, it's a lot less work to use something that's real-time. If we're both working on nice modular features, and they just need to use the code I wrote as-is (or only make some small targeted changes that they can do without my help), git branches are useful. Sometimes it's been useful to be able to prototype something in real-time while bouncing ideas off each other or if I'm trying to help them get something specific working in their code (but I don't have nearly as much familiarity with the other parts of what they're doing).

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