This approach doesn't scale.

Pair programming once in a while can be incredibly valuable. I am glad to meet with anyone and talk over their code in person, brainstorm designs, run through a debugger together investigating it.

But if you asked me to do that for most of an 8 hour day - much less most of the time in general - I would quit the job faster than you could fill out the paperwork. Constantly having someone looking over your shoulder is a world of stress and overstimulation that I (and I suspect many others) will not stand for.

Then you've never actually Pair Programmed. It's not "someone looking over your shoulder", it's literally two people writing the code together, one person at the keyboard and the other person saying what's next. Two brains working in tandem on the same problem space.

It works really well, but it is exhausting, and difficult to sell.

> Pair programming once in a while can be incredibly valuable.

> a world of stress and overstimulation

yeah so I think the thing here is that one of these is an objective outcome of pairing, and the other one is a personal preference. Which is a valid preference, but it does nothing to refute the fact that pair programming is a great solution for the issues laid out in the article.

I don't particularly like writing tests, but that doesn't stop me from doing so. I think we should think about pair programming like we think about tests: a necessary part of the process, and something most companies don't do enough.

“It doesn’t scale” and “it’s unreasonably difficult for many people” aren’t the same thing.

It scales fine to 400+ engineers. You do have to be willing to hire specifically for pairing tolerance.

I imagine it would become a different job altogether, more in the style of buddy cop movies: you'll be spending all your work hours doing every project with your partner, sometimes they code, sometimes you do, but you become a single unit for all intents and purposes.

I'd also hate it with every cell of my body, but for some it's just another way of life.

Fascinating; I find myself a lot more stressed and overstimulated when facing a problem alone than with a friend.

In the last company I worked at, when a project was major enough (read, long-running and full of tricky details) to require two devs' full-time attention, they'd hole up in a flex room for weeks at a time.[0] "The cave" basically became their temporary office until they'd re-emerge ~a month later.

I spent a few weeks in the cave and it was surprisingly chill, not nearly as oppressive as it sounds. (Although, I was much more energetic a decade ago and maybe it wouldn't be quite as fun these days :-P.) I still have a picture of my madness-induced, Git hook–infested scribblings....

[0] The team's usual room was an open floor plan, which was fine with good headphones, but naturally that solution doesn't work for pair programming.

In our current environment using AI, individual development also "doesnt scale", so this "doesnt scale", 2X.

I think these proponents of AI have a very large burden on them to not just make this palatable for developers, but to actually make it "scale" as you say.

The human code review process for AI generated code will simply die due to lack of interest. Its up to the organization to find a suitable replacement or continue to pretend that half asleep disinterested developers are going to fix all this trash.

Have fun with that!

my performance goes up when i pair program. even if the partner is a junior, simply because i am more focused.

I did it full-time for 3 months and it was exhausting. I found it useful for learning a new framework (Ruby on Rails at that time) but in general I did not find it compatible with how I think and work.

Is this not what programming alongside or with an AI agent is these days? Brainstorming, reviewing, debugging. The only difference is there's no second human building a working knowledge of the code being written.

> Constantly having someone looking over your shoulder is a world of stress and overstimulation that I (and I suspect many others) will not stand for.

I suspect this is a simple social anxiety you could train away.

To me pair programming is outdated. I did it for a year, and I understand that it can have some strengths, sometimes for some software. In the LLM age though, I haven't seen it, and don't think we ever will again. The stress, overstimulation, and exhaustion were real costs that the business just does not care about. "You are engineer, you not have feelings, bang keyboard harder with other Engineer."