I taught my Claude to teach me new skills, where I wanted to understand its work deeper. Specifically, I wanted to learn coccinelle semantic patching, so I told it to find potential places to apply it but withhold the solutions from me. Instead, it walks me through producing a patch myself.

Yeah I’ve been meaning to try this more seriously, to have the agent be teacher and give me hints and force me to do the typing. It’s somewhat difficult to both find the time to do this at work, and also to have the self-control. I’ve done some half-hearted attempts, but when it gets to the repetitive and easy to understand parts, I start to slide back to letting the agent do it, and then sooner or later it’s handling trickier things again.

The other thing I want to try more at work is, rather than programmers at desks individually talking to agents, do pair or group programming with an agent in the room where the people discuss the design while the agents listens, asks questions, and writes the code live. We’ve had a few meetings where we do this, and it feels much better than individual vibe coding, because as a group we review the design as we go and prevent going down paths I might have gone down by myself. It combines the coding and review into a single session and ensures everyone present is comfortable with the design.