Disclaimer: I'm an older dev out of the game. I could definitely see the bigger picture faster than I could type it (except for challenging tasks), but that typing time was also synergistic thinking time. Not unfrequently, I'd find a better design while writing the code. Even if it didn't make it into that codebase, it could be filed away for future reference.

Edit: I recall reading somewhere that John Carmack doesn't care about which editor he uses because typing was never the bottleneck. Admittedly, he worked on some really difficult problems.

This is part of what I don't understand about the new narrative. I agree in principle that yes, the mechanical act of writing code was always the real bottleneck. But people act like all you have to do is carefully plan everything out up front, double check it at the end, and bob's your uncle.

I always found that the act of chugging the code helped to refine my thoughts along the way, including the big picture of it all. I've adapted in that I still have agents do most of the heavy lifting of code writing. But it still requires me to be invested in the details, which can't happen at the scale people discuss when they're talking about full on agentic development.