I'm full remote and mentored a recent CS graduate this last month. I put in the effort to send him a slack message at least once a day (I didn't say it was a lo

I'm full remote and mentored a recent CS graduate this last month. I put in the effort to send him a slack message at least once a day (I didn't say it was a lot of effort). And we do a mix of working together on tasks and working separately. When we do work together we use a new code-with-me feature of IntelliJ and I'll lead the development but when I need a utility function or something I ask him to write it and he goes off and writes it separate from my current coding. This is a legitimate help, not a burden. He wrote an interface to another service for me, and I never had to be distracted by it. I had a concern about something but he said he had read the documentation and that the way he wrote the code was correct. I trusted him, he turned out to be right. In the editor this is like having 2 or 3 cursors moving around in the project editing things independently, Google Docs style. I flip tabs to check in on him periodically. If I want to show him something I just place my cursor and type, in contrast to telling him what to type with words which was never very effective in the office. This is a form of pair programming that is actually productive and enjoyable, imagine that! If he were sitting 5 feet from me I would want to collaborate the same way. Two screens, keyboards, one codebase, casual voice communication. We have all this.