What separates a productive hour with a coding agent from a wasted one? I’ll argue that the answer lies less in raw model capability than in the interactional patterns users bring to their sessions. Novices tend to adopt a passive stance, and as a result most of the failures they experience are invisible (conversations that end cleanly while the user walks away with the wrong answer). Expert users, by contrast, iterate collaboratively, refining goals and critically assessing outputs; they take on harder tasks, fail more visibly, and recover more reliably when things go wrong. Even experts, though, engage in a variety of session types, from quick transactional exchanges to deep collaboration. Each implies its own notion of success and calls for its own affordances. The picture that emerges reframes what we should be optimizing for: when we design coding agents, we are designing user behavior as much as model behavior.
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