> So much of tech was/is a long list of heavily scoped down tasks that eng takes an order of magnitude longer than today.

I disagree. Based on my personal experience, a lot of time is spent on fine tuning code and double checking the docs. The first pass can be very quick especially if you already have sample code (from the docs or other parts of the project). But when it came to fine tune, that's where the other 90% of the time is going.

A lot of daily activities of engineering is massaging code, either from bug reports or requests after someone tested the features. And a lot of time is spent gathering details, comparing it with what already built, and then apply correction.

From what I've seen with people doing agentic coding, that feedback loop in the development phase is very superficial. Then the most important feedback loop (the one with the user) is distorted as the software is constantly changing.