Coding used to be the slow part. Not the hard part. The slow part. It's where the hours actually went. Put rough numbers on a normal project and it looked something like 15 percent planning, 75 percent coding, 10 percent testing. On a good day. Plenty of work skewed harder, more like 10, 85, 5, where you thought for a minute and then typed for a week.
Then agentic coding showed up, and with a real plan in front of it, the shape changed. A project now feels more like 50 percent planning, 15 percent coding, 35 percent testing. The fat middle got thin. Both ends got heavy.
Here's the part I keep turning over: the work didn't disappear. The bar is still full. I'm not doing less. I'm doing different. The hours I used to spend hand-writing the implementation now go into describing it well enough up front and checking it hard enough at the end. The agent took the long stretch in the middle that used to be mine.
So the agent is fast. It just didn't buy me a shorter day. It bought me a different one. The bottleneck moved from "can I type all this out" to "did I describe the right thing, and can I tell whether it came back correct." Those were always the hard parts. They were just hiding behind the typing.
I'm not sure that's a loss. Planning and verifying are the parts that want a human who actually understands the system. Coding was the part I was happiest to hand off. But it's worth being honest about what happened. Nobody removed the work. They moved it to the two places that were always harder to fake.
The typing was never the job. It just looked like it, because it took the longest.