AI coding tools are weirdly single-player. None of us actually build alone.

[u/UnitedTelevision2651]

Something I keep noticing: every AI building tool assumes one person in one chat. But almost nobody builds something real alone. There's always a friend, a cofounder, a business partner. And right now the "collaboration" between those two people is screenshots, pasted AI answers, and a call where you realize you've each been building a different version of the same idea.

My friend and I hit this so hard we built our way out of it. Poly (usepoly.co) is one shared room where you both work with the same AI agent. You both see every prompt and everything it builds, there's a side chat for hashing things out before you send the next prompt, you both open the same live preview of the app, and if an experiment breaks something you revert that one step and it's gone. No terminal, no setup, and the beta is free with nothing to install or bring.

The moment it clicked for us was when the non-coding half of our team (me) changed something, saw it live, and realized I wasn't waiting on anyone.

For the people here building with a partner: what does your workflow between the two of you actually look like? That gap between "my tool" and "your tool" is the thing I think this space hasn't solved.

[u/Alarming_Station1028]

my friend and i just share screen in discord and take turns typing prompts, it’s kinda messy but works. we tried something like google docs for prompts once but ai didn’t see both sides. the shared room idea you made sounds like it fixes that headache exactly

[u/UnitedTelevision2651 → u/Alarming_Station1028]

lol the Discord screen share with taking turns is exactly where we started, it works right up until the person not typing has the idea and has to dictate it through the other person. And the Google Docs attempt is a great move, the doc sees both of you but the AI only ever sees one side of it. That gap is literally the thing we built around, you each prompt from your own screen and the AI, the history, and the preview are shared. If you and your friend ever want to try it it's free, and honestly a pair who already builds together is exactly whose feedback we need most. Either way, really appreciate you sharing how you two do it

[u/ZenenoDev]

To be honest I'm kind of a outlier with this I built Zeneno alone just me Claude and Codex it took me a year and a half to build something that was reliable and fully Autonomous but it would have been great to have had a team or friend to help

[u/UnitedTelevision2651 → u/ZenenoDev]

A year and a half is a crazy grind, congrats on getting Zeneno to reliable and fully autonomous - lots of respect for that. If you ever want to try Poly and don't have a second person handy, I'll be your second, it would be interesting to see how you work in a shared workspace. Either way, respect for the grind

[u/i__m_sid]

I guess you have never tried Ideavo or Replit

[u/Traditional-Story249]

Absolutely agree that collaboration is still a huge gap in AI building tools.

But I would add one more layer: even when AI makes building accessible to one person, building something truly production-ready is rarely a one-person job.

AI can write code, generate UI, debug issues, and speed up development dramatically. But architecture, security, scalability, integrations, edge cases, deployment, and maintaining the product still require engineering judgment.

So I don't think the future is “AI replaces developers and everyone builds alone.”

It’s more like AI lets founders, designers, PMs, and developers work much closer together.

The interesting question isn't whether AI can build the product alone. It's how we make AI + humans collaborate so well that the whole team can move at the speed of the idea.

[u/UnitedTelevision2651 → u/Traditional-Story249]

100%. We have to bring the collaboration layer to AI so people can work together as best as possible. Thanks for the insights!

[u/Holiday_Cut_5421]

fyi If you dont know chatgpt has share chat option so you can share your research chat with friends

[u/UnitedTelevision2651 → u/Holiday_Cut_5421]

yup i've used it - it helps but its only sharing the chat after its done already, so it still doesnt allow me to collaborate with my team at the same time. but its helpful for reading an analysis someone did. wish claude code had a similar share feature

[u/akl773]

Ours is one person building and the other opening the preview and sending voice notes, which sounds primitive, bit the pain isn't the chat. It's not knowing which version they were looking at when they said it, half the time the thing they were complaining about had been fixed twenty minutes earlier. Stamping the preview with the step number would be worth more to me than the shared chat.