So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place?

That has always been my feeling. Once I really understand what I need to implement, the code is the easy part. Sure it takes some time, but it's not the majority. And for me, actually writing the code will often trigger some additional insight or awareness of edge cases that I hadn't considered.

At least with my experience at amazon it wasnt.

if i wanted, i could queue up weeks worth of review in a couple days, but that's not getting the whole team more productive.

Spending more time on documents and chatting proved much more useful for getting more output overall.

Even without LLMs ive been nearby and on teams where review burden from developers building away team code was already so high that youd need to bake an extra month into your estimates for getting somebody to actually look.

"So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place?"

Of course it wasn't! Do you think people can envision the right objects to produce all the time? Yeah.. we have a lot of Steve Jobs walking around lol.

As you say, there's 'other stuff' that happens naturally during the production process that add value.

> actually writing the code will often trigger some additional insight or awareness of edge cases that I hadn't considered.

Thinking through making.