For context, I am a product manager at a big tech company who has been building side apps for fun (and profit) since the days of Palm OS. I am effectively an SDE1 with 20 years experience, who has deep expertise in a lot of obsolete tech (C, Objective-C, Perl) and some exposure to modern stuff (TS, React, Rust, Swift).

In the past year, I've been able to personally drive projects several orders of magnitude than what I could ever build myself. I'm not asking Fable to 1-shot grand theft auto, I am creating steering files, running adversarial reviews, prototyping, automating testing, and building my projects the slow way. Still, I don't write any code, just requirements and prompts and generate the rest. Our internal development teams at my company have arrived at a very similar process (much more sophisticated) by investing heavily in steering files that encode development approaches, harness and other mechanisms to automate best practices. It is getting to the point where our development process are becoming really similar, and many of the SDE do not need to review code for the majority of their deliverables, instead they are working on the framework (harnesses) and auditing. (Of course they still do look at the code because the love coding. But they usually don't need to)