Team Programming
We’re not pair programming anymore, we’re team programming.
Originally posted on X.
I remember my first dev job in L.A., a warehouse outfitted with long desks filled end to end with monitors. It was the first time I ever worked alongside other developers (as someone who was self-taught).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I learned more in my first 2 weeks than I did in the previous year learning from books, videos, tutorials, etc...
Now we have the most intelligent peers available at all times, but that’s not even the interesting part.
Most of us have been pairing 1:1 with agents. The context we give it is based on things from our brain, machine, and filesystem. Fine for solo work, but the majority of software is built in collaboration with others.
We’ve always worked in teams. What’s changed is the enormous friction between engineers vs designers, PMs, and everyone else no longer exists. The compiler now understands us all equally.
Most agent tooling has yet to catch up. Developers still work in their own silo, on the terminal or IDE, pushing updates with no visibility into their conversations or prompts.
But agents are moving from sync (local) to async (cloud) [1], [2], [3].
We now have visibility into the mind of the agent engineer, and for the first time ever we can collaborate on context and contribution in real time.
Slack, Linear, other interfaces or custom entrypoints via an API, it doesn’t matter. The conversation is the prompt, and the environment lives in the cloud.
The prompt becomes a collaborative artifact. Something a PM drafts, an engineer refines, and the whole team learns from.
A designer can watch reasoning unfold and jump in before it goes down the wrong path.
Product decisions leave a trail that lives next to the code.
Onboarding becomes archeological. New hires dig through agent sessions the way we used to dig through git blame, except now the why is actually there
Teams build shared intuition for what works with the agent, the same way I built shared intuition sitting next to someone at a long desk in a warehouse.
Institutional knowledge stops living in people’s heads and starts living in the system that does the work.
So I guess we’re not pair programming anymore, we’re team programming. The same magic as that warehouse in L.A., just no walls and infinite chairs.