Amidst the explosion of AI coding agents, I fear something is getting lost. There is a sense of humanness about software development which used to exist and is being pushed out. With people “pair” programming with coding agents, thinking with AI chat, and pushing AI slop code to open source repositories, something is lost - connection.

More than anything, what makes us human vs machine is the sense of connection we need to function together. That connection flavors everything that we do, including writing code to program computers. See, a software department is rarely a single person and often it is many developers. Until now it has been common for developers to work alone. This is antithetical to what Extreme Programming has been.

Extreme Programming called for developers to sit and work together. It encouraged pair programming and test first development. It urged us to connect and work together while solving problems. The promise held with these practices were many and included:

  • Learning together
  • Designing together
  • Sharing knowledge
  • Sharing code ownership
  • Designing outside of a vacuum
  • Verifying software as it is written

This is just the tip of the iceberg. With programmers working alone, these benefits are largely lost. Now, with programmers working with AI to generate code, even the programmers, themselves, aren’t learning and designing. We are in a world of push button, get software. Is that where we want to be?

I believe that now, more than ever, software should be created together. If you are prompting a coding agent, write the prompt together. Learn about the system that is being built and guide the AI instead of letting the AI run unbounded and roughshod across the source code that, once upon a time, was built by human hands.

So, lest we forget, this is not a time of isolation. This is a time to come together and grow. Building software may have changed, but humans have not. I implore you to take the time and run a pair programming session. Share what you know and learn from the developers you work with. Share ownership over the system, even if the code is AI generated. De-slopify your connection with the humans around you and build something great.