I can imagine this being useful at particular junctures in a project - perhaps it's real crunch time on a critical feature, where everyone needs to put their mi

I can imagine this being useful at particular junctures in a project - perhaps it's real crunch time on a critical feature, where everyone needs to put their minds together to solve one difficult problem, everyone is months in and on an even footing, and you just need one guy to type it all out; or perhaps a brainstorming session where you're trying to throw together a workable basic prototype very quickly; or even debugging and fixing a complex issue might be well-served by this approach - but I can only imagine doing this day-in, day-out would drive many people absolutely insane. I'm sure there are genuine reasons why many developers like to sit at their desks with their headphones on and the volume turned up (even if it does annoy the hell out of managers). In my own team, we periodically pair up to do peer review and testing, and sometimes prototyping of new features. I try and avoid doing this more than about once a week, though.