Comment by vidarh

The entire point is we increasingly don't need to be authors.

Most of us aren't paid to be authors in your analogy.

(Which is good, because outside of your analogy, most authors are paid peanuts, and most of those of us who do write do so because we enjoy it, not as a job)

But even if our jobs were to be authors, while I learned some things about writing books from writing the novels I have written and published, I learned far more from being a voracious reader for decades.

I probably needed both, and I'm sure I'd improve as a writer past what I could from just reading by writing more, I think your analogy if anything is a perfect fit for my point that we don't need to spend more than a tiny proportion our time writing to be competent at it (I won't claim great).

Many of us will probably keep doing it for fun, but it will be increasingly hard to justify "manual coding" at work.