I've been coding for seven years, and I still can't decide if pair programming actually makes teams more efficient or just gives managers a way to monitor us more closely. We ran a two-month experiment at work pairing everyone on a critical feature, and our velocity dropped 30% in the first sprint, but the bug count in production fell by half. Could the long-term quality gains outweigh the immediate productivity hit, or are we just measuring the wrong metrics to judge collaboration?