I'm confused by people who pair all the time, because it seems like the benefit of pairing varies heavily depending on the current programming activity. For ex

I'm confused by people who pair all the time, because it seems like the benefit of pairing varies heavily depending on the current programming activity. For example, when I'm debugging, I can easily be several times more productive with someone else trying to guess what is going wrong. On the other hand, for most "glue programming", it feels like a huge waste of time to be looking over someone's shoulder while they try to figure out the best library to play sound or how some website API works. Regular programming where all of the libraries and general plan are known seems in between those two extremes. Sometimes a second person can help detect problems and/or keep the first person on their game, but sometimes basic conflicts over code style can arise. I've never been part of a pair programming shop, but I've tried pair programming with similarly inexperienced pairs before. How do people who pair all the time resolve problems like redundancy when looking up or learning information? Relatedly, how do they solve situations where basically one person is the only person who understands how to solve the problem (either because of skills like statistics or because of knowledge like understanding some API), and the second person is just along for the ride?