No human should have access to production systems. All work should be done in development. This should be pushed to test systems. Once QA signs off on the code changes, then the code should be pushed onto the production boxes from test, with a plan to roll back if there are any issues. All changes should go through these steps, because nobody is perfect, every change should be carefully monitored. And of course if a production box goes away you should be able to just set up new hardware and push all your code onto the box in a few minutes and be up and running again.

Back in the day I wrote my own C HTML parser, back before it was a solved problem. I even had my own version of xpath for it.

I am an awesome programmer, when using actual programming tools. You know, vi on a terminal. I find that programming over a phone or a white board is pretty useless to me. For instance, I just copy and paste skeleton projects and fill in the blanks to do programming tasks. In dozens of scripting and programming languages. So I don't remember syntax usually for a language without the hints provided by the skeleton modules. I actually had one guy ask me to write out the program to do the Fibonacci sequence... without telling me what that was. Sure, I had done it before, back in 1989 in college. He seemed very disappointed that I didn't know what that was off the top of my head and quickly terminated the phone call, despite the job being for messaging, which I was prepared to discuss/program in excruciating detail.