There's something wrong where its too easy to accidentally pickpocket people. I keep finding myself in sneak mode with a non companion follower such as one of the scribes for the scribe missions and if you are picking stuff up in sneak mode with the activate button, the follower gets too close to you and suddenly you taking things from their inventory to their dismay and most likely to your real companion's dismay (e.g. "Nick didn't like that"). I've had to reload from save a number of times to erase the bad affinity that results. Is this a bug or a bad design?

That's never happened to me. My allies stay behind me for the most part. If they do, by chance get in front of me, the red text that comes up is enough to deter me from pick-pocketing them. But I guess this has a lot to do with the fact that I don't steal or pick pocket things in this game.

If you do, I can understand how you keep falling into this trap as it can be hard to discern "do" from "don't" when you're do both.

Yeah I'm OCD about it and take everything. I don't even look to see what it is. It does not seem to happen to regular companions, I think they stay back far enough. But have it happen all the time with any other quest level follower.

Gotcha. Personally, I don't think its a bug or bad design but more of the mentality you have when you loot things. Like you said, you literally take everything without thinking twice.

When I initially started playing Fallout 4, I would constantly try to cancel out of the loot menu because that was what I was familiar with in previous Fallout games. The result was me pulling up the pipboy. It took a while but I trained myself not to cancel out of the menu anymore and simply walk away from the container/corpse.

Hopefully you can do something similar for your accidental looting.

The only question I have is, why the hell are you sneaking in allied territory? are you role playing your character as a hunch back?

Ease up on the button-mashing, look before you click.

I don't have a problem with stealing from quest companions but god.. they are always in my way. I think it has something to do with the sneak ability and their perception maybe? I notice that they often aren't detecting me.. so they tend to run up to exactly where I am instead of following at a nice distance. Once they detect me they go back to an ok distance again.. but it's really annoying. What's weird is that i remember skyrim having the same problem.. Quest companions did not sneak if you did. .. they then patched this at some point so that they would. Now, here they are making the same mistake. All companions should sneak if you are sneaking and just remain behind you until you engage the enemy.