If its any typical corporate job, as they said I imagine the coding is rather boring.

We need a new feature. Ok add this controller, add some if statements for this business logic, make some api calls, add this to the db, write some models. Ok done, same thing over and over again.

Id certainly love to be able to do the architecting part and have someone do the work

Coding as the fun stuff need you to be able to focus and due to responsibilities (which include a whole lot of system architecture, people management I do enjoy and can do well).

Basically you get to a point in your life and career where you have to decide whether you want to be the absolute best engineer, or whether you want to be building the best environment for building and retaining the best engineers. I kicked the can down the line but it was eventually having three kids which made me realise that the latter was my path. That and it was becoming increasingly harder to actually do #1 when you seem to be surrounded by incompetents taking the second path who, as they often never became competent engineers but seem to have a large influence on decisions as a group.

It's not that I like writing code exactly it's that the domain of the code I can write to a professional level doesn't overlap with the code I find interesting to write. Or in the case of web frameworks, worth spending two days understanding the new dialect of whatever the latest fad framework is so that I know what I'm doing and not copy/pasting or otherwise working from example.

What might make it hard to understand is that the vast majority of people who call themselves engineers don't do so to the level I consider professional; especially in the app / web development / start-up world.

The way I read it (and I agree with, so biased) is that OP hates that the focus of writing code is generally-perceived as a negative, hence the proliferation of code assistants, AND hates that focus is harder to obtain because of life stuff.

Most non startup corporate programming jobs are just adding/removing features, add a checkbox here, squash this business logic bug, add a new dept code here, etc. You never build anything new, it's just piddly maintenance stuff.

Started with computers in 1986, and I don't want to become something else other that programming related activities, even if only partially due to architecture and devops stuff, unless obliged to by external factors.

Already did management tasks occasionally, and I rather be stuck on the last step of the career laddder with a job that makes me happy, than one I have to drag myself to office (physical or virtual one).

Eventually if healthy enough close to retirement age, I might as well do something completly different than computing related.

Nope not at all. The first ~10 years were as a kid, so not professionally. Professionally I'm at the top of my niche and decided to work as a consultant instead of starting doing my own startup or starting an agency as I wasn't able to commit and have a family, and I loved writing code (and was bloody good at it, and at making my teams much much better by leading by example & helping them grow).

I spent the pandemic being one of the key players in the pandemic response, writing a lot of code but also helping a load of teams over different countries collaborate, and anything else I could do to make everything work. Oh and bringing up kids at the same time.

Now I'm at a startup, finally, and getting the engineering team off of the ground. Still trying to code (it's really hard to give up chasing the highs) a bit but there's less time for it and no time for the really hard deep dives (and I'm not willing to ignore my family to no-life it as others can do).

With that context, yeah, it's not as enjoyable. Sure I could try and transition back to a full-time coding roll and yeah, I'd be working on fun puzzles and enjoying it, but that means my impact is more limited. It's a better use of my skills + experience to be doing what I'm doing. Pays more too but both pay well :-)

It can happen if you develop health issues like carpal tunnel or Sciatica due to extended sitting. Programming then gets mentally associated with pain.

I on the other hand find agentic LLMs mentally draining.

I can't enter a flow state since the workflow boils down to waiting and then getting interrupted, and then waiting again. Often the LLM does the wrong thing and then instead of moving to implement another feature, I'm stuck in a loop where I'm trying to get it to fix poor decisions or errors.

It's possible I get a feature implemented faster thanks to agentic LLM, but the experience of overseeing and directing it is dreadful and pretty much invariably I end up with some sort of tech debt slop.

I much prefer the chat interfaces for incorporating LLMs into my workflow.