I knew this was happening and I told myself it was fine. My time was needed elsewhere: strategy meetings, stakeholder alignments, roadmap reviews, writing promotion cases for yearly reviews, coaching a member through a difficult dynamic with a coworker. That's the job. I believed it, mostly. Code and design reviews became process conversations. My production commit history went quiet.
Then the agentic era arrived, and the distance between what managers understand and what engineers are actually doing started to feel like a liability. Decisions being made without enough context. I picked it back up.
I'm writing about the experience as it happens in the Rebuild section of this blog.