Developers Are the New Middle Management

For the past 6 months, I’ve typed almost zero lines of code by hand. So do I still call myself a coder? Kinda. If your role is purely to code, you have to admit the job today is drastically different from 5 years ago. Here’s what I think the job has become. Coding used to be 80% of the job The dev’s role was to create code. About 80% of our time went to coding-related work. But that never meant 80% typing. Half of it was really documentation: reading docs, understanding frameworks, learning new tech, weighing alternatives, designing. The other half was the code itself. Writing it, making it compile, waiting for the compiler, fixing bugs. Now it’s 20%, and shrinking Agentic coding inverted that. Coding-related work is down to 20% of my time, probably less. Whatever coding time remains goes to actually learning new technology, trying alternatives, or prototyping. Everything else, AI does better: it types 1000x faster than us, reads documentation better than us, picks up new frameworks…