Is there any future for pairing?
First, a disclaimer.
In the last 9 months or so, I’ve effectively been a solopreneur, so I haven’t fully experienced what creating software on a team with access to the gen-AI tools of today looks like. I haven’t had the opportunity to practice pairing in this new world, and so what follows is simply my best guess at what the future may hold. Like all AI-related predictions, take it with a generous grain of salt.
In a world where an LLM can, with the right nudging, function as an effective pair collaborator, and with increasingly agentic capabilities being developed, I struggle to see how pair programming, as I’ve broadly experienced it in my career up to this point, will continue.
But I do believe AI tools will require even greater collaboration between humans, not less. I think the trend to smaller, genuinely cross-functional teams that AI enables and encourages means that pairing will no longer be the preserve just of engineers.
Especially in the ‘forward-deployed’ teams, which will rely on AI code-generation tools to quickly create and iterate on prototypical features and products, I see that the ability to pair effectively with the business function feature is meant to serve will be invaluable.
Rather than sales requesting a feature, being triaged and analysed by a PM before being put in the backlog, broken down and estimated before being implemented by an engineer, these long and painful handover cycles will be collapsed. I envisage quick and rapid experimentation done by a technical AI user while pairing with the relevant business function, being able to quickly see what works and makes sense and, most importantly, getting it into the hands of users and getting real feedback before deciding to invest more in it by handing it over to the ‘rear-deployed’ teams to productionise it.
In a sense, AI is likely to mean the end of pair programming.
But we are just at the beginning of truly cross-functional pairing.
Pairing to create software isn’t just for engineers any more.
If anyone can program code using AI, then it’s time for Extreme Programming to be embraced by everyone.
So where does that leave us?
