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.
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.
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.
Thinking through making.
Essentially something big has to happen that affects the revenue/trust of a large provider of goods, stemming from LLM-use.
They wont go away entirely. But this idea that they can displace engineers at a high-rate will.
I feel the current proliferation of LLMs is going to resemble asbestos problem: Cheap miracle thingy, overused in several places, with slow gradual regret and chronic harms/costs. Although I suppose the "undocumented nasty surprise" aspect would depend on adoption of local LLMs. If it's a monthly subscription to cloud-stuff, people are far less-likely to lose track of where the systems are and what they're doing.