Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Is AI the better programming partner? Human-Human Pair Programming vs. Human-AI pAIr Programming

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2306.05153 v2 pith:REZTMKEX submitted 2023-06-08 cs.HC cs.AI

classification cs.HCcs.AI
keywords programmingpairhuman-aihuman-humandifferencesexpertisemeasuresadapt
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

The emergence of large-language models (LLMs) that excel at code generation and commercial products such as GitHub's Copilot has sparked interest in human-AI pair programming (referred to as "pAIr programming") where an AI system collaborates with a human programmer. While traditional pair programming between humans has been extensively studied, it remains uncertain whether its findings can be applied to human-AI pair programming. We compare human-human and human-AI pair programming, exploring their similarities and differences in interaction, measures, benefits, and challenges. We find that the effectiveness of both approaches is mixed in the literature (though the measures used for pAIr programming are not as comprehensive). We summarize moderating factors on the success of human-human pair programming, which provides opportunities for pAIr programming research. For example, mismatched expertise makes pair programming less productive, therefore well-designed AI programming assistants may adapt to differences in expertise levels.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 11 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. When Models Know More Than They Can Explain: Quantifying Knowledge Transfer in Human-AI Collaboration

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Model benchmark performance only weakly predicts how well people learn from AI explanations, with notable outliers across code and math.

  2. The Help Ladder: Skill-Adaptive Peer Scaffolding for Real-Time Collaborative Programming

    cs.HC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Structuring peer help requests as progressively harder levels (Canary's Help Ladder) increased the number of help sessions and resolved issues in small-team programming tasks.

  3. From Developer Pairs to AI Copilots: A Comparative Study on Knowledge Transfer

    cs.SE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Knowledge transfer occurs in both human pair programming and GitHub Copilot sessions, but Copilot users accept suggestions with less critical scrutiny.

  4. The Revolution Has Arrived: What the Current State of Large Language Models in Education Implies for the Future

    cs.HC 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 2.0 of 10

    A narrative review of LLMs in education that speculates, without new evidence, that conversational interfaces will replace traditional WIMP-style interaction as the default.

Pith tools