> I think ultimately, at the end of the day, I expect and hope that every human I work with is a competent, solid individual contributor and does not require a co-driver to produce meaningful work.
IMO this is a very wrong way to look at pairing. It's not about one person being incapable of delivering a solution on their own, it's that having multiple perspectives on the code will lead to a higher quality and more well designed product.
You could use the same argument you're using to say we shouldn't do code reviews, because we should trust that every developer is competent.
Also, at least in my experience, design isn't primarily or even mostly confined to an initial design phase. Most of the 'design' of a problem occurs when you're actually coding.
IMO this is a very wrong way to look at pairing. It's not about one person being incapable of delivering a solution on their own, it's that having multiple perspectives on the code will lead to a higher quality and more well designed product.
You could use the same argument you're using to say we shouldn't do code reviews, because we should trust that every developer is competent.
Also, at least in my experience, design isn't primarily or even mostly confined to an initial design phase. Most of the 'design' of a problem occurs when you're actually coding.