alt Hacker NewsSenior engineer with 25 years of experience here. I wish I spent enough time actually coding that 10x-ing my coding productivity would matter much to my job. Most of my day is spent wrangling requirements, looking after junior devs, stamping out confusion brush fires before they get out of control, and generally just trying to steer the app away from a trainwreck down the line.
When I do code, it's almost always something novel that I don't know how I'm going to implement until I code a few pieces and see how they fit together. If it's a fairly routine feature based on an existing pattern, I assign it to one of the other devs.
This is basically the thing I keep coming back to with the agentic tools. It is the wrangling requirements, stamping out confusion, and steering away from a trainwreck down the line that are the actual challenging parts of the job and we can't automate those yet. Once you do actually know the code change you want to make though it is pretty nice to change it 10x faster than before.