I sincerely hope this (10 lines of code a week) is hyperbole. I would be fine with 3 weeks to hit production - not everybody works on a SaaS, I've had six months release cycles - but... not writing code?
I've probably not even gotten 10 lines a week at some jobs. One gig was mostly all ad hoc reporting stuff, with a lot of cut and paste of previous impls. Another place I and two others spent a year on a project that should've taken 2 months, I didn't write any new code at all for at least 6 months of that project. Specifically there was a lot of back forth, requirements changes from the business owners, on the part I wasn't involved with, before the project went live.
This was typical for the first 10 years of my career until I took a lead position. Now I work all the time, and I focus on organizing and coaching up my team so I don't have to do as much.
When the code base is bad enough, fixing a bug can take a small code tweak but days to discover and days more to test. Especially if refactoring bad code isn't an option at the time.
