Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.

I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.