[barrkel]

Yup. Building up a shared understanding of a potential solution, and then fluency in converting that shared understanding into code, is my goal from a code pairing interview.

Crucially, I don't think it's important to have critical insight into the problem and come up with a solution unaided. We don't work alone - if we can come up with a solution together, and the candidate can be trusted to implement the solution, it's what we need.