At pre-covid days for collaborative development, it was enough to sit closer to see each other screens. Unfortunately, covid changed everything, and it looks like those changes are permanent.
People started pair programming using screen shares, plugins for IDEs, and other workarounds. This partially solves the problem, but still not even close to full collaboration.
I don’t think it’s possible to completely replace the real-life co-working process with virtual communications on the current technical level. Metaverse is not so close. Still, at least development tools are evolving in this direction.
VS Code has Live Streaming, Atom has Teletype. JetBrains, for a long time, was the outsider in this process. Now I understand why — they were focused not on adding collaboration tools to existed IDEs but on working on the principle new IDE - Fleet.
It looks very similar to VS Code and is focused on collaborative development. It’s not released yet, but the announced architecture and features are exciting.
Go check yourself, and I’m sure you will subscribe to the Fleet news =)