When people talk about coding assistants, the topic of pair programming inevitably comes up. Our profession has a love-hate relationship with it: some swear by it, others can't stand it. Coding assistants now beg the question, can a human pair with the AI, instead of another human, and get the same results for the team? GitHub Copilot even calls itself "your AI pair programmer." While we do think a coding assistant can bring some of the benefits of pair programming, we advise against fully replacing pair programming with AI. Framing coding assistants as pair programmers ignores one of the key benefits of pairing: to make the team, not just the individual contributors, better. Coding assistants can offer benefits for getting unstuck, learning about a new technology, onboarding or making tactical work faster so that we can focus on the strategic design. But they don't help with any of the team collaboration benefits, like keeping the work-in-progress low, reducing handoffs and relearning, making continuous integration possible or improving collective code ownership.
