I’ve been finding that pairing with someone to help them get familiar with building with agents to be a very effective way to help them get started successfully. Everyone enters the process with a different set of skills and it’s tough to know what parts will be confusing or challenging for them.

When you’re pairing, you get to fly through the parts that your pair knows already and stop and focus on the parts that don’t come as easily or that they aren’t familiar with. With support on the surrounding tasks, they have a chance to get a feel for prompting and developing a workflow for safely trying things out with the ability to revert if something breaks.

With an agent, you get to bring your expertise to the software you’re building. The words, terminology, and your ability to describe what you want are the springboard to using the agent to build what you want. But there are a lot of barriers to entry: the terminal and system setup, getting API keys or paying for an agent subscription, and countless decisions that may feel consequential or irreversible when you don’t know better. Having someone trusted to guide you through these parts gives you a great chance to see the opportunity and possibilities of coding with an agent.