yea, a lot of my prior work was in the "code is the easy part" I was a frontend engineer for years. And something like 90% of my job the code was not the hard part.

I loved writing GPU shaders or optimizing visualization performance, but most of the time it was wiring up netcode to UI elements that exist.

Ironically as I've moved into focusing on more GPU and kernel programming AI is now lapping me there anyway, however the impact of knowing what sort of algorithsm are state of the art in papers, what is causing memory bandwidth issues etc... does a lot to drive the machine.