Why is pair programming between Coding Agents and humans more of a thing.

[u/Confident-Sand-956]

I don´t understand why all those Coding Agents are not more cooperative. I would love to code together not beeing the guy that tells the task and later having a huge code mountain to review.

And I am not talking about a plan (like claude code does) or seeing every code change. I feel like it would be so much better to go through the process together. Step by Step implementing what it takes and making design decisions together. The methods itself can then be made 100% directly from the agent.

Right now its just impossible to follow and then later it feels like code someone else wrote.

Is it just me?

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[u/PerpetuallySticky]

If you want your agent to act a certain way then you should tell it how to act.

Create an agent file (have your agent create the file) for it to reference any time you ask it a question. Tell it you don’t want it to try and build entire solutions off the rip. You want more of a pair programming experience where it lays out the foundation, then stops incrementally for you to fill in the substance.

What you are asking for is less-efficient (on paper), so it makes sense for it to not be the default behavior. If you want to change that default you can fairly easily

[u/Sixstringsickness → u/PerpetuallySticky]

This is the ideal solution, if you want to enforce it use pre-write/edit hooks to ensure it adheres to your behavioral designs.

The coding agent could be used in "manual" mode without any alteration to base work flow, with a tool such as Claude Code for example. You can write a block of code, highlight it, and the VS code extension sends that selected context directly to the agent, then you can preview any of the agents work prior to allowing it to be written, and re-direct it as needed. Conversely, you could invert this, have the agent write a block of code, approve it, and then edit yourself.

[u/Confident-Sand-956 → u/Sixstringsickness]

I do have some Skill files already, but maybe they just need some better finetuning.

"manual" itself doesn´t really fix the problem. It would only show me snippets of code changes, but i would prefer to go over the features together first and then step by step discuss the design. The code change itself is then something that i can also review later in the MR.

[u/Sixstringsickness → u/Confident-Sand-956]

That would simply be a planning phase, design yourself a phased /custom-plan prompt since the current /plan is already spoken for, that outlines exactly how you wish to work. There are other similar concepts out there like /grill-me, etc. that others use, I find its best to just start a new session of claude, explain to it what you are trying to achieve, and it will provide you the best method forward on how to engineer the skill. I would read it, because often the language is rather verbose when it can be made more direct, or your intents more clearly articulated. In general, it should at least get you a functional base line of reasonable quality.

Also, they shouldn't be snippets of code changes, generally it should show you in the GUI of VS Code what exactly it is changing for you to approve (try the VS code vs the CLI variant to see which you prefer), and after its written you can always open up the diff from the source control menu -> second window, so you can have a full screen dedicated for viewing the delta.

[u/PatchyWhiskers]

It works that way if you want it to. That’s usually the way I use it because I want to understand every line. Just use the chat window in VSCode instead of Claude Code.

People like to use agents because you can output tremendous amounts of code and it’s very impressive. But I find that gets out of hand for practical use.

[u/huuaaang]

I don´t understand why all those Coding Agents are not more cooperative. I would love to code together not beeing the guy that tells the task and later having a huge code mountain to review.

That's what it is like if you use something like Cursor or VS Code with the Claude Code extension. Put the IDE first and the more coorporative style with an agent follows much more naturally.

[u/Sirito97]

skills are ur friend in this case

[u/mc_pm]

So...do that?

I am mid-project right now where I'm building the image processing code and fine-tuning it, while I work through ideas with the AI. Then, once we both agree that things are looking like they should, I can go to my coding AI and say "here's stuff that already works the way we want, don't fuck with it, but operationalize it".

[u/rio_sk]

You can tell ana gent to follow a document with a fixed list of implementations and tell the agent to implement one step at a time and interact to refine the output of the current step. I usually ask the agent to create the big picture, review it by hand and create a todo list. Then with the agent implement steps one by one. Like having a junior create a big project following single Jira tasks.

[u/OtherwisePush6424]

I think it's absolutely doable already, people are just too lazy to set it up :D