In no particular order

    - Meetings
    - Reading papers
    - Understanding legacy code
    - Reading internal news
    - Ad hoc chats with coworkers
    - Writing docs
    - Editing configs
    - Thinking about solutions
    - Slacking off
    - Analyzing results
    - Testing code
    - Reviewing PRs
    - Understanding others' ongoing projects

It sounds plausible to me since this is pretty en par with most other engineering disciplines. I’m a civil engineer. My responsibility is ultimately mostly to produce a constructable plan set. I spend far less than 5% of my time drafting or modeling.

Commenting on Hacker News?

The least experienced developer writes the most code. Juniors would be spending whole day in the IDE, typing, testing, typing etc. Senior developers will go to a park for a few hours, think, then come back spent an hour or less typing code that just works or write nothing at all, maybe even delete code. Instead they might update documents, ask clarifications about found edge cases or errors in planning that were not considered.

Sneering at "kids these days"

[dead]