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Website Source: blog / pairy_blog

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Pending synthesis from local website source.

Original source title: pairy: AI pair programming the way I like it

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Note: I got a GitHub Copilot invoice and realized a Gemini API key was sitting unused in a .env file. Two days later I had a Neovim plugin that does most of what Copilot does, costs nothing, and I can read every line of it. Sometimes the best motivation is a bill you didn't expect.

pairy: AI pair programming the way I like it

  • Project Home: [github.com/yash-srivastava19/pairy](https://github.com/yash-srivastava19/pairy)
  • Language: Lua (Neovim plugin), Gemini API

Own your tools

There's a principle I keep coming back to: own your tools. Not in some vague philosophical sense, but literally - if a tool is important enough to be in your daily workflow, you should understand how it works, be able to modify it, and ideally not be paying a SaaS subscription for the privilege of using it.

AI coding assistants are in my daily workflow now. They've been genuinely useful - not as a replacement for thinking, but as a rubber duck that can also write code. When I'm stuck on an API I've never used, or want to see three different ways to approach a refactor, having a capable model available is valuable.

But the existing options all had something that bothered me.

Copilot is great, but it's GitHub's SaaS product. Monthly subscription. I don't fully control what gets sent where. The completions are good but I have no visibility into the model being used or how to tune the behavior.

Cursor is genuinely impressive - the context awareness is miles ahead of Copilot. But it's a whole separate editor. I've spent years getting my Neovim configuration exactly right. I know every keybinding, every plugin interaction, every quirk. Switching to Cursor means starting over with a VSCode fork that I don't control.

Integration Notes

  • Source section: blog
  • Local source: /home/yashs/Desktop/Programming/yash_blog/yash-srivastava19.github.io/blog/pairy_blog.md
  • Raw copy: raw/website/yash-srivastava19-github-io/blog/pairy_blog.md

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