Comment by a_tartaruga

Basically everything is just faster and I can focus either on solving things that matter more or I can work less. I've never been a great developer but now it feels like I have the option to be one as defined circa 2020.

Code base is weird so maybe my situation is too unique to generalize. Overall its systems engineering across 10s of OSS repos in 3-4 languages and a decade of abstractions operating a biggish open system at scale. A strange mix of work doing both in depth slow critical maintenance of the system and fast shoddy prototyping on top of it.