It's not an easy question - depends on you, the company, and so on. I worked in two software companies (well, one pure software, and the software division of another) and never made it far past the 'grunt' level, but I know that some of my more senior colleagues were also frustrated at being kept away from the day-to-day design/coding work by internal politics, meetings, travel and so on. I never really got senior enough - talking
large companies - for it to be an issue for me; in fact, I welcomed the travel I got
And now, while I am still coding, it's in a very different environment - writing stuff for internal use in a non-computer company.
So, it depends on what you want. If you think it would be productive, there's always the option of being honest with your boss, even blunt if you've got what it takes to pull it off. Just tell him (guessing it's a him) that you're not happy with your current situation, you don't particularly want to leave the company, but if the work you want isn't made available, you'll be forced to look elsewhere to see if other companies can offer it. That may be a 2-part conversation - firstly that you're unhappy and want to be closer to the code, secondly that you may be able to find what you want elsewhere... I had a conversation like that a few years ago with my (then-)manager - the stuff I was working on, while easy, was boring, unchallenging, and had no opportunity for growth, either in skills or in professional levels, but I knew there was a
new project starting up with some hardcore stuff, which I'd done some of the early planning/design for, and I pretty much told him that if I didn't get put on that project, I was going to walk. While the code didn't ship before the whole team was laid off earlier this year, and probably never will ship, I ended up working on it for almost 2 years, learning a lot, and, well,
I was the guy demonstrating it to the public and the press last summer
So it could be worth a go...
Alternatively, if you want to be coding, and keeping your skills toned for the future, I recommend picking one or more open source projects and getting involved. There are (tens of? hundreds of?) thousands out there, in every language and on every platform under the sun, and the vast majority would welcome someone with some experience coding/designing and some enthusiasm to help them out. And I can tell you, from having been involved in hiring at my last company, that in that situation at least, it was considered almost as good as commercial experience - so someone who hadn't been coding at their day job, but had been working on open source stuff, wsan't thought of as someone who would be rusty at all.
Speaking of day jobs, this got long...
Should I leave? 
