TL;DR
AI pair programming eliminates the fear of unfamiliar territory. With expert guidance always available, generalists can confidently explore new domains without the anxiety of making costly or “obvious” mistakes. At the same time as you are accelerating your learning you have an infinitely patient and non-judgemental pair programmer to look over your shoulder and nudge you when needed.
“I’m not really a frontend developer, but…”
How often do we preface our work with these disclaimers? Generalist developers live with constant low-level anxiety about working outside our primary domains. Will this React component follow best practices? Is this SQL query going to perform terribly at scale? Am I about to commit some obvious security blunder?
This impostor syndrome isn’t just uncomfortable – it’s limiting. We either avoid certain tasks entirely or approach them so cautiously that we miss opportunities for innovation and growth.
AI pair programming changes this dynamic fundamentally. It provides what a sort of “confidence safety net.”
Want to try implementing a GraphQL API but worried about N+1 queries? Your AI pair programmer will guide you through proper resolver patterns and caching strategies. Curious about Rust for that performance-critical service? You can explore options – including just getting started with the right toolset, basic language constructs and compilation invocations – and find references to where to read the actial documentation.
The safety net doesn’t make you reckless – your AI pair programmer will highlight risks and suggest alternatives. But it removes the paralysis that comes from working in unfamiliar territory.
For generalists, this confidence multiplier might be the most valuable aspect of AI pair programming. It transforms “I can’t do that” into “I haven’t done that yet.”
Building on: AI Pair Programming: On-call Subject Matter Experts for Generalist Developers