I love the incredible learning opportunities pair programming creates. So it’s a little sad when I encounter a teachable moment, but my pair is a coding agent who can’t learn.

Working with a human engineer, such moments are very exciting. My pair would benefit from learning, I’d feel good about teaching them, and we’d all benefit from the human engineer being more capable going forward.

With current coding agents, there’s little point trying to teach lessons conversationally. Next session, that guy will still be a dummy! We don’t have our usual organic, lovely mechanism for teaching, learning, and growing together. Ouch.

What do we get instead? A free lesson for anybody who thinks leadership is all about performance management. Instead of making your agent smarter or more motivated – because you can’t – you step back and ask how you can make it more successful.

What mechanisms exist in your little agentic org for ensuring that strategy makes its way down to the fine details? What context does the agent need, exactly? How do new threads learn about the codebase quickly? How do you define, communicate and enforce rules? How do you improve the developer experience for your agent? How is work best scoped and defined for it?

When you take individual competence off the table – not because it doesn’t matter, but because you don’t control it – you are forced into systems thinking.

PS: If you want to talk about experiential learning for coding agents then DM me, I am very interested.