[khendron]

When I first tried an LLM agent, I was hoping for an interactive, 2-way, pair collaboration. Instead, what I got was a pairing partner who wanted to do everything themselves. I couldn't even tweak the code they had written, because it would mess up their context.

I want a pairing partner where I can write a little, they write a little, I write a little, they write a little. You know, an actual collaboration.

[icedchai]

Have you tried recently? This hasn't been my experience. I modify the code it's written, then ask it to reread the file. It generally responds "I see you changed file and [something.]" Or when it makes a change, I tell it I need to run some tests. I provide feedback, explain the problem, and it iterates. This is with Zed and Claude Sonnet.

[dkersten]

I do notice though that if I edit what it wrote before accepting it, and then it sees it (either because I didn’t wait for it to finish or because I send it another message), it will overwrite my changes with what it had before my changes every single time, without fail.

(Zed with Claude 4)

[Macha]

My approach has generally been to accept, refactor and reprompt if I need to tweak things.

Of course this does artificially inflate the "accept rate" which the AI companies use to claim that it's writing good code, rather than being a "sigh, I'll fix this myself" moment.

[searls]

I do this too and it drives me nuts. It's very obvious to me (and perhaps anyone without an incentive to maximize the accept rate) that the diff view really struggles. If you leave a large diff, copilot and cursor will both get confused and start duplicating chunks, or they'll fail to see the new (or the old) but if you accept it, it always works.

[psadri]

I usually add “discuss first. Don’t modify code yet”. Then we do some back and forth. And finally, “apply”.

[dragonfax]

Claude Code has "plan mode" for this now. It enforces this behavior. But its still poorly documented.

[lodovic]

I try to be super careful, type the prompt I want to execute in a textfile. Ask the agent to validate and improve on it, and ask it to add an implementation plan. I even let another agent review the final plan. But even then, occasionally it still starts implementing halfway a refining.

[carpo]

Same. I use /ask in Aider so I can read what it's planning, ask follow-up questions, get it to change things, then after a few iterations I can type "Make it so" while sitting back to sip on my Earl Grey.

[mock-possum]

In all honesty - have you tried doing what you would do with a paired programmer - that is, talk to them about it? Communicate? I’ve never had trouble getting cursor or copilot to chat with me about solutions first before making changes, and usually they’ll notice if I make my own changes and say “oh, I see you already added XYZ, I’ll go ahead and move on to the next part.”

[lomase]

I’ve never had trouble getting cursor or copilot to chat with me about solutions first before making changes

Never had any trouble.... and then they lived together happy forever.

[tobyhinloopen]

You can totally do that. Just tell it to.

If you want an LLM to do something, you have to explain it. Keep a few prompt docs around to load every conversation.

[artursapek]

I do this all the time with Claude Code. I’ll accept its changes, make adjustments, then tell it what I did and point to the files or tell it to look at the diff.

Pair programming requires communicating both ways. A human would also lose context if you silently changed their stuff.

[haneul]

Hmm you can tweak fine these days without messing up context. But, I run in “ask mode” only, with opus in claude code and o3 max in cursor. I specifically avoid agent mode because, like in the post, I feel like I gain less over time.

I infrequently tab complete. I type out 80-90% of what is suggested, with some modifications. It does help I can maintain 170 wpm indefinitely on the low-medium end.

Keeping up with the output isn’t much an issue at the moment given the limited typing speed of opus and o3 max. Having gained more familiarity with the workflow, the reading feels easier. Felt too fast at first for sure.

My hot take is that if GitHub copilot is your window into llms, you’re getting the motel experience.

[catlifeonmars]

> My hot take is that if GitHub copilot is your window into llms, you’re getting the motel experience.

I’ve long suspected this; I lean heavily on tab completion from copilot to speed up my coding. Unsurprisingly, it fails to read my mind a large portion of the time.

Thing is, mind reading tab completion is what I actually want in my tooling. It is easier for me to communicate via code rather than prose, and I find the experience of pausing and using natural language to be jarring and distracting.

Writing the code feels like a much more direct form of communicating my intent (in this case to the compiler/interpreter). Maybe I’m just weird; and to be honest I’m afraid to give up my “code first” communication style for programming.

Edit: I think the reason why I find the conversational approach so difficult is that I tend to think as I code. I have fairly strong ADHD and coding gives me appropriate amount of stimulation to do design work.

[pbhjpbhj]

I've asked for hints/snippets to give ideas and then implemented what I wanted myself (not commercially). Worked OK for me.