I'm retired now, but I spent many hours writing and debugging code during my career. I believed that implementing features was what I was being paid to do. I was proud of fixing difficult bugs.

A shift to not writing code (which is apparently sometimes possible now) and managing AI agents instead is a pretty major industry change.

Well you should be surprised by the number of people who do not know this. Klarna is probably the most popular example where the CEO was all about creating more code, then fired everyone before regretting

At my company doubling the writing-code part of software projects might speed them up 5%. I think even that’s optimistic.

Imperfectly fixing obvious problems in our processes could gain us 20%, easy.

Which one are we focusing on? AI. Duh.

Lots of people have good judgement but don't know the arcane spells to cast to get a computer to do what they want.

I'll stare at a blank editor for an hour with three different solutions in my head that I could implement, and type nothing until a good enough one comes to mind that will save/avoid time and trouble down the road. That last solution is not best for any simple reason like algorithmic complexity or anything that can be scraped from web sites.

I don't understand this thinking.

How many hours per week did you spend coding on your most recent project? If you could do something else during that time, and the code still got written, what would you do?

Or are you saying that you believe you can't get that code written without spending an equivalent amount of time describing your judgments?