Comment by worthless-trash

In my limited experience, the 'pairness' part of pair programming , is best done in silence. The discussion / planning happens up front, the keyboard person does the implementation and the second person doesn't 'backseat drive', but thinks about test cases (writes it down), thinks about weaknesses (writes it down) and writes documentation while the code is written.

All of these are reviewed before commit.

The 'interrupting' while coding is the shitty part (I agree with you), not having someone working with you.