Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers SE Radio 714: Costa Alexoglou on Remote Pair Programming
Apr 1, 2026
Costa Alexoglou, software engineer and co-founder of the open-source Hop pair-programming app, discusses building low-latency remote pairing tools. He talks about what effective pairing looks like, the tooling problems that break collaboration, architectural choices to hit sub-100ms latency, and lessons from implementing secure, cross-platform streaming and developer workflows.
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AI Won't Replace Human Pairing
- AI assists change how we code but don't remove the need for human-centered pair programming.
- Costa argues AI handles character-level typing, while humans still provide prompting, context, and review to avoid low-quality outputs.
Video Tools Force A Thousand Small Productivity Cuts
- Typical video-conference tools force painful workarounds: blurry text, long verbal navigation, and IDE-only sharing.
- Costa calls this a 'dev by a thousand cuts' where teams waste flow on zooming, pointing, and juggling tooling.
Define Hard Performance Specs Upfront
- Set firm performance specs before building performance-critical tooling.
- Hop enforced a sub-100ms round-trip latency requirement and prioritized cross-platform open-source design from day one.