Pair programming is often sold as a silver bullet for code quality and knowledge sharing, but I'm not convinced it deserves that reputation. In my team, we tried it for three months and saw collaboration improve, yet our velocity dropped by nearly 20% because two people were stuck on simple tasks that one could have done alone. The real question is whether the long-term benefits of shared context outweigh the immediate cost in speed, and I think teams rarely measure that trade-off honestly. Some tasks are inherently solo—like deep debugging or learning a new framework—and forcing a partner in those moments just breeds frustration. I'd rather see pair programming reserved for complex, cross-module work and let developers own their routine code solo.