Bruno API Client | Blog & News

Remote Pair Programming: How to Keep Flow, Not Fight Your Tools

Written by Costa Alexoglou | Nov 13, 2025
This post was guest authored by Costa Alexoglou. If you're interested in contributing to the Bruno blog you can reach us at devrel@usebruno.com!
Pairs don’t need more meetings; they need sharper collaboration. When you’re hands-on with a teammate, three things decide whether the session sings or stalls: crystal-clear code on screen, near-instant input, and effortless control hand-offs. Purpose-built pairing apps deliver on that far better than generic video calls.

The Short List Developers Love Using

  • Hopp - open-source, built by devs for devs. Its Rust-powered real-time stack provides very low latency and true shared keyboard/mouse control. The app features "rooms" for recurring sessions like onboarding, bug bashes, or incident drills. As an OSS project, it also allows for self-hosting.
  • Tuple - native engine, razor-sharp screen share, and remote control that feels local. One-click swaps when it’s time for your pair to drive.
  • CoScreen (by Datadog) - multi-user screen sharing so everyone can control windows at once, plus annotations and a shared terminal for incident-style work.

Why these over Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Slack Huddles?

Meeting apps are built for conversation first. Pairing tools are tuned for readable tiny fonts, snappy control, and quick swaps, so you stay in flow instead of narrating cursor moves. Most of the meetings apps do offer screen sharing (and Zoom can hand control to another person), but they don’t center the fast, co-equal, developer workflow in the way pairing-first tools do.

Under the hood: many pairing apps target sub-100 ms interaction because after this threshold control does not feel local (and based on Apple’s Human Interaction guides). Hopp has public write-ups of how they measure and drive that latency down with WebRTC.

A Simple Way to Start Pairing Remotely

  1. Pick a style. Driver/Navigator for thorny refactors; Ping-Pong for test-first changes.
  2. Block 45–90 minutes. Short loops, swap roles on each green test or every 25–30 minutes.
  3. Name the session. e.g., “fix-429-retry” or “auth-timeouts-retrofit”. It keeps focus and makes the room easy to rejoin.

Then:

  • Create a virtual room and invite your pair. Rooms make recurring sessions effortless.
  • Share and co-control. Don’t just watch; both people type, click, and select text.
  • Swap fast. When the navigator has an idea, pass the wheel instantly rather than dictating keystrokes.

“Isn’t VS Code Live Share enough?”

Live Share (or anything equivalent) is great inside the editor; editing, debugging, and a shared terminal. Most real sessions spill outside the IDE: investigating a failing build, running requests inside Bruno desktop client, stepping through a Grafana dashboard, poking at AWS Console settings, jotting notes in a spec. That’s where whole-desktop, shared-control pairing tools shine.

Tooling Tiers (Pick What Matches Your Moment)

  • Tier 0: Meeting apps Slack Huddles, Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams screen share for quick looks. Fine for a “can you peek?” moment. Zoom lets you pass remote control on request.
  • Tier 1: Pairing-first apps: Hopp, Tuple, CoScreen when you need crisp text, shared control, and instant swaps. These keep your cadence high, help you maintain a flow state, and cut “wait, scroll back” chatter.

     

    Here is how to call someone in Hopp. Not any link sharing, just one click and you can start pairing.

  • Tier 2: IDE-native co-editing: Live Share or similar when all work stays inside the editor; great for using while on code navigation/exploration tasks, and minor adjustments to a codebase.

Bruno’s Take

This post lives on Bruno’s blog, so here’s the tiny why from us: we prefer Hopp for remote pairing. The developer-first ergonomics line up with how our audience works. Also Hopp is open-source, as Bruno, and we support building software in public!

An exclusive Hopp discount is available for the first 50 Bruno subscribers who use the coupon code BRUNOHOPP30.

 

Here is a demo of remote controlling our teammates' computers. We can write code, and navigate in Grafana dashboards, with native gesture support.

Conclusion

If you’ve only tried pairing over a standard meeting app, run your next ticket in Hopp or Tuple or CoScreen. The difference shows up in minutes, sharper text, tighter loops, and two brains moving like one.