I get what you're saying, but I would say that this does not match my own experience. For me, prior to the agentic coding era, the problem was always that I had way more ideas for features, tools, or projects than I had the capacity to build when I had to confront the work of building everything by hand, also dealing with the inevitable difficulties in procrastination and getting started.

I am a very above-average engineer when it comes to speed at completing work well, whether that's typing speed or comprehension speed, and still these tools have felt like giving me a jetpack for my mind. I can get things done in weeks that would have taken me months before, and that opens up space to consider new areas that I wouldn't have even bothered exploring before because I would not have had the time to execute on them well.

The sibling comments (from remich and sanufar) match my experience.

1. I do love getting into the details of code, but I don't mind having an LLM handle boilerplate.

2. There isn't a binary between having an LLM generate all the code and writing it all myself.

3. I still do most of the design work because LLMs often make questionable design decisions.

4. Sometimes I simply want a program to solve a problem (outcome-focused) over a project to work on (craft-focused). Sometimes I need a small program in order to focus on the larger project, and being able to delegate that work has made it more enjoyable.

I think for me, the difference really comes down to how much ownership I want to take in regards to the project. If it’s something like a custom kernel that I’m building, the real fun is in reading through docs, learning about systems, and trying to craft the perfect abstractions; but if it’s wiring up a simple pipeline that sends me a text whenever my bus arrives, I’m happy to let an LLM crank that out for me.

I’ve realized that a lot of my coding is on this personal satisfaction vs utility matrix and llms let me focus a lot more energy onto high satisfaction projects

> deep / fast / craft-and-decomposition-loving vs black box / outcome-only

As a (self-reported) craft-and-decomposition lover, I wouldn't call the process "fast".

Certainly it's much faster than if I were trying to take the same approach without the same skills; and certainly I could slow it down with over-engineering. (And "deep" absolutely fits.) But the people I've known that I'd characterize as strongly "outcome-only", were certainly capable of sustaining some pretty high delta-LoC per day.

As a former tech lead and now staff engineer, I definitely agree with this. I read a blog post a couple of months ago that theorized that the people that would adopt these technologies the best were people in the exact roles that you describe. I think because we were already used to having to rely on other people to execute on our plans and ideas because they were simply too big to accomplish by ourselves. Now that we have agents to do these things, it's not really all that different - although it is a different management style working around their limitations.

It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

You’re possibly not entering into the flow state anymore.

Flow is effortless. and it is rejuvenating.

I believe:

While communication can be satisfying, it’s not as rejuvenating as resting in our own Being and simply allowing the action to unfold without mental contraction.

Flow states.

When the right level of challenge and capability align and you become intimate with the problem. The boundaries of me and the problem dissolve and creativity springs forth. Emerging satisfied. Nourished.

This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.