Ask HN: Do you still do pair programming in this agentic age?

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[ARTICLE · art-112815] src=news.ycombinator.com ↗ pub=2026-08-27T07:49Z topic=ai-tools verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Ask HN: Do you still do pair programming in this agentic age?

A Hacker News discussion asks developers whether they still practice pair programming in the age of AI agents, with one commenter encouraging teams to pair as 'two humans, as many agents as necessary,' reporting better and faster outcomes than solo work, though without empirical data.

read1 min views2 publishedAug 27, 2026

If you do:

What's the setup: two humans + one agent, or two humans + two agents
What do you actually pair on?
Do you find it more (or less) valuable than before?
And many more questions...

I encourage my teams to pair as often as possible. Usually the format is "two humans, as many agents as necessary". From what I've seen the outcomes are better than anything one human could do, and faster. I have no real data to prove that though.

source & further reading

news.ycombinator.com — original article Ask HN: Would you pay for an AI API that guarantees zero prompt retention? PaaS IaaS GaaS all in one. And 2 AI <compound> models Taalas API Anyone?

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