In my over a decade of experience as a software engineer, writing code was always a smaller fraction of my time compared to reading code, debating code with colleagues, and wrangling ops. Optimizing for velocity of writing code will inevity lead to spaghetti at best and vaporware at worst.
There is also discussion, ping pong with the agent, exploring parallel paths, quickly experimenting, analyzing code, researching things. A code agent can do more than "write me as much code as possible, go!".
I feel like this take misses what LLMs actually bring to the table to a senior developer.
Sure writing code was not the majority of my workday since I moved up in responsibility chain - but that's because I don't get enough uninterrupted time to do the actual coding from all the meetings, syncs, planning, production investigations, mentoring, team activities.
Now that I can delegate code writing to LLM instead of mid/junior devs the dynamics of those tasks change dramatically. The overhead of managing more junior devs is completely gone and no need to have soft skills with an LLM. And communication/iteration speed with LLM is not comparable.
Not to mention I don't need soo much time to get back "into the zone" - LLM can keep working through my meeting - when I'm back it's already working on something and I can quickly get back into the gist of it - much faster than before when I had to take a break and lost all context of what I was doing an hour later. LLM has all that context + more progress right there.
After soo many years of dev I have a pretty good idea of what I want the code to look like - no need to debate the overzealous mid dev about his over abstracted system that's going to haunt me in a production outage next month when we both forgot what he put in - I simply get to say "this is shit rewrite it how I requested". No need to "talk about latest lib that's all the rage on the YouTube blogs etc."
Sure sometimes I realize that doing stuff without LLM would have taken less time - but when I consider how many interruptions I have between my coding sessions - LLMs are empowering precisely because I get to dedicate so little time to my code.
Also less teammates means less communication overhead.