Pair Prompting

Friday, September 4. In pairs today.

Two Jobs: Prompting and Observing

Wednesday you started your website on your own. Today you keep going, but not alone. You’ll sit with a partner. One of you is prompting: you work on your website in Codex, exactly as you did Wednesday. The other is observing: you watch how your partner asks the agent for things, not whether the site is any good, and you say what you see. Then you swap.

Watching someone else do this is the fastest way to see your own habits, as long as you’re doing something while you watch. Most people in the room are doing this for the first time, and the person watching you is figuring it out too.

Pair Up

Open the pair page. It shows you a code. Give it to your partner, or type theirs. Three is fine if the numbers don’t work out; so is pairing with me. If you came in late, do the same thing whenever you arrive; the page plans around the time that’s left.

Whoever’s code was used prompts first; the other one observes.

If You’re Prompting

Build. Keep the pair page open in a tab: it shows who you’re with, how long the round has, and when to hand off. Talk to your partner while you work; say what you’re asking for and why. When the page says it’s time, ask your observer what they noticed, then press the button and swap.

If You’re Observing

Your screen shows your partner’s conversation as it happens, a few seconds behind, so look at their screen too. Your notes come in three shapes:

• I notice: something that happened, in their words where you can. “You wrote ‘fix it’ and the agent changed three files.”
• I wonder: a question you’d ask them. “Did you look at the page before you said next?”
• What if: one thing to try. “What if you told it what you expected to see?”

Say them out loud as you go; that’s the point. Write down the ones worth keeping. Your notes go to your partner after class, not during, so write them for your partner to read later.

Things worth watching for. When something went wrong, did they say what they saw or what they concluded? Did they ask for an outcome or dictate the steps? When the agent said it was done, did they look? When it went a different way than they wanted, did they say so? Did they ask the agent what it needs from them?

There’s a companion on the page that can see the same feed. Ask it what just happened, or ask it to help you turn something into a note. It won’t build anything, and it will keep handing you questions to ask your partner. Prefer the partner.

Switching

Your page shows what we’re doing right now and roughly how long it has. When I move the room on, everyone moves: on a round, that means everyone switches seats at the same time, and your page will say so. You can also switch sooner between yourselves — press the button. In a pair everyone talks twice; in a trio, once.

The Last Few Minutes

I’ll read a few notes from around the room, without names, and ask what you noticed about your own prompting. Then I close the session, and the notes about you appear on your pair page.

Last thing, every session from now on: tell the course how it went. It’s a short conversation rather than a form, two or three minutes. It isn’t anonymous — I see who said what, and the page says so before you start — and it’s the main way this class changes while you’re still in it. If something today was bad, that’s the useful thing to say.

If you’d rather see it than read it, there’s a walkthrough: the whole activity recorded end to end, both students’ screens and mine side by side.

Your partner following your conversation is what the syllabus means by observing on your own screen. The pair page says exactly what they can see and for how long, and either of you can leave a pair. Nothing is handed in.