In my experience this is true when you're solving easy problems. The hard part of solving lots of easy problems includes managing time, not making errors, crea

In my experience this is true when you're solving easy problems. The hard part of solving lots of easy problems includes managing time, not making errors, creating simple, understandable abstractions, etc. Solving well lots of easy problems in a consistent, manageable way is itself a hard problem, to which pair programming is imho a great solution. I've come to the conclusion that for individual hard problems, where you're trying to understand how to implement a complicated algorithm or some such, individual programming allows a much better attention span. It's hard to get "in the zone" pair programming. In this case, I prefer "asynchronous pair programming" (joke), by which I mean code review and asking colleagues for advice.