Most of the time is spent figuring what the right thing to do is, not writing the implementation. Sometimes the process of writing the implementation surfaces new considerations about what the right thing is, but still, producing text to feed to a compiler is not the bulk of the work of a software engineer. It is to unearth requirements and turn them into repeatable software.
If you’re spending time thinking and not experimenting, then it’s because experimentation is expensive. With an LLM you don’t have to try to predict a complex system in advance, experiments are so cheap to can just converge to a solution directly. None of this pontificating; it’s really not that useful anymore.
Feels like lately most of the time is spent arguing about or at least worrying about whether or not AI is going to replace all software developers.