The biggest part of "writing the code" was/is gaining an understanding of the system you’re building, but more often, extending. Especially when working with mature/“brownfield" (dislike this term a lot) systems.
If you say you're not reading the code anymore without telling me how you’re gaining an understanding of the system, you're simply skipping that step.
"Development" is indeed accelerated, right until something breaks or is too slow and you can't fix it in a relaxed manner.
@simeon I already had that, but the calories and raw energy expenditure stopped me from mania coding everything I wanted, now the mania is in the cloud.