Over the past several years, while I have beem climbing up the career ladder I've been coding less and less, to the point that during last two years I have hardly written any. While I have decades of experience and I'm still keeping up with the latest developments in the area I doubt I could just jump back being a day to day coder.
Sure, my long experience and knowledge gives me the needed perspective to lead and take care of other programmers. That's my day job now. I've worked with many of them side by side past in the days, so they do know what I'm capable of. But there are also those who are new to the company. They have never seen me in action. I'm sure they trust I'm not in this position without merit, but sometimes I feel like I need to prove myself to them even if they don't expect it from me.
This week I started a small side project at work, developing an internal tool to help us manage our external collaborators access in Github. It's a feature they are lacking, so need to work on something our own as we have a growing number of those as well and it is becoming harder to manage them by hand.
I was happy to notice that it came easy to me, after a moment of reminding me how things worked. I took this opportunity to try out the new A.I. coding assistant tools and while they were helpful when trying to remember all the syntax etc. I soon found out it's still faster to write the code by your own hand. All the prompting, adapting the suggestion and fixing their mistakes still takes longer than just straight writing the code yourself.