I'm curious about how a software developer's time is distributed across different phases of a product's lifecycle, how much time is spent writing code, reading code, writing design docs during each of these phases.

And, for 'each of these phases' I mean during ideation, prototyping, and after gaining users shifting towards maintenance, refactoring, and scaling.

At what point does feature development slow down in favor of bug fixes, tech debt reduction, and performance improvements?

Also, how does time allocation change in different environments—startups vs. big companies, SaaS vs. consumer apps, open-source vs. enterprise software?

Any patterns you've noticed?