Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
I lead software for a living. That means my days are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, unblocking people, and saying “no” a lot. The last time “writing code” was my actual job was a long time ago. I never stopped being able to code — I stopped having the time to code. At least in my day job. There’s a difference, and every engineering leader reading this feels it in their bones.
I’ve long been off the critical path because as a tech lead I have a lot more random stuff (and meetings) to deal with. I’ve been able to vibe code some non-production stuff like scripts to unify feature lists across JIRA, specs and the upstream docs which has helped free up time to hand craft more code on production.
I don’t care too much about the quality or maintainability of those scripts as long as they make my life a bit easier. I do care about the maintainability of the production code base.