Just to back you up most surveys say only 10% to 20% of programmers time is coding.

Microsoft study of 484 developers, published in 2025 says 11%.

Another Microsoft study where programmers had telemetry installed showed 21%

https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/writing/2017-meyer.pdf

It's interesting. I remember around COVID, there were a bunch of startups building 3d printers for concrete housing. Then I looked up the actual cost of construction for a typical house, and only 14% of it was the most visible part (the balloon framing and physical house). Most of the cost is in foundations, plumbing, wiring, and things like insulation, flooring, cabinets, etc.

I guess at Microsoft coding is similar to building a house in that sense. Either that or all big orgs devolve into large amounts of time spent on politics.

90% of my time these days is trying to understand what the wall of claudeslop jira ticket is actually asking for. It's like archeology digging for the original customer issue to work out what is actually wanted underneath paragraphs of root cause load bearing seams.