alt Hacker NewsPair programming is a great way to do knowledge sharing and collaborate on tricky problems. Now, I don't really want a multiplayer editor, but I'll highly contest that coding is solely a solo activity.
Sometimes I feel like people online hate all their coworkers. Thankfully, such people have not been highly represented amonst those I've worked with.
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It's less hating coworkers and more enjoying the perfect logic that comes from interacting with a cpu versus the fuzzy nature of human moods etc. It's likely why a lot of people (myself included) got into coding.
Ah, now I hate all my coworkers because I don't want to share a keyboard. Incredible insight.
I read "coding" as literally the act of being in the text editor and writing the code, not the encapsulating job of defining requirements, desigining a solution, etc. which is definitely not a solo activity.
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.
pair programming is when two people collaborate on engineering decisions while one of them codes.
I am willing to bet there’s a strong correlation between people who post/comment on Internet forums and anti-social behavior.
There’s tons of reasons
- 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.
It's not hating coworkers. It's more that state of flow is not compatible with collaboration with other people. Getting to pair programming flow is basically like the neural "Drift" in Pacific Rim: it just doesn't work with two random people, or with shifting moods, energy levels or priorities.