These tools require a certain approach to do pair-programming, but I’m OK with not actually sitting at the same computer alongside someone, or sharing some video conference. More a case of being a navigator with occasional driving where I do the coding locally and submit it back to the LLM.
If you can pay, you can use the locally-running tools to get a more interactive session going.
The usual caveats about using AI apply, of course, but that’s the fun part of working with others, be they human or not. You never know quite how it will go!
1. Ask the candidate to walk through the last project they shipped alone, end to end, including the boring parts: deployment, the bug they introduced and how they found it, what they would cut if they had half the time. People who have actually shipped talk differently about this than people who have only worked inside teams where someone else handled the messy half.
2. Pay for a small paid trial that mirrors your real work, scoped to a day or two. Not a LeetCode puzzle. The trial predicts the working relationship; the interview predicts their interview skills.
The other thing that changed my results: stop looking for a co-founder when what you need is capacity. A recurring paid engagement with a developer who delivers one task at a time serially gets most solo founders further than equity conversations with strangers, and it ends cleanly when it stops working.