I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers.
Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve. Especially if you need to also oversee the execution of the strategy. So not only you have to predict what they want or know the domain deeply enough to understand what they say they want is not what they really want, you also have to come up with a plan for executing your solution in a corporate environment.
There is a reason that books like "the staff engineer's path" cover topics such as local maximums, communication, establishing support for executing a plan or creating alignment on big efforts. In large corporate environments with multiple international customers, code is most of the time not the hardest problem.
> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place.
Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers. Either directly or worse. The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.
> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers.
That's like saying "building a car is not hard, building a real car that you can use and that passes regulation is".
IOW, writing code is hard in every reasonable context.
Your analogy breaks down because code is not heavily regulated as cars are.
This is worth saying precisely because of this difference - people see huge amounts of bad code generated by LLMs and think it is equivalent to carefully written code because the results look similar at first glance and they don’t bother to read it.
How many programmers operate under that kind of regulatory and operational constraint regime? I think most don’t.
(In interesting ways this is programming’s greatest boon and curse: if we treated it more like building bridges or cars, the world would be a very different place.)
Touch billing, touch medical data, be at a B2B company that needs to catch all the ISOs to have a chance to land bigger contracts. I don't think it's uncommon.
It might be an unpopular option, but I think the regulatory regimes that control medical and financial privacy as they interact with software are significantly lighter touch than e.g. the regimes that control material quality for bridges and tunnels, much less airplanes.
I think most do. You often sees that OSS often provide a disclaimer that they’re not liable for damages. You can’t easily do that when you provide a paid service. B2B often have SLA contracts that usually keeps everyone on their toes and not sling bugs right and left.
I believe Graeber perfectly predicts the problems, in 2019, with vibe coding creating immediate "value" from production, but failing to produce true value through maintaining the system (like one continually washes a cup to give it value over time).
Exactly. Writing code is easy. Junior developers do it all the time. Hell, they write far mode code and do it faster!
I go half the speed of a junior developer, but the code I write lasts five years to a decade with an order of magnitude or two fewer bugs and long-term maintenance burden.
Wow, some "the killer is calling from inside the house" vibes right there. But I totally agree that the game of telephone has always been _an_ issue - maybe not _the_ issue but certainly a big one.
> The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.
That doesn’t describe any devs I know, especially not in the old days. Interrogating customers and bringing back requirements was the job of management (who got big salaries, too.)
Agree. What a strange perspective. Engineering is what is hard, and that includes coding and non-coding activities but doesn’t require customer interrogation.
Nobody is arguing that typing lines of code on a computer is hard.
However, when it's the AI that does the thinking in place of the programmer, it's not "the engineer writing correct code" anymore since the engineer...isn't engineering, it's the AI that becomes the engineer. period.
> Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers.
Plenty of programmers never interact with the customer, this is the job of the analyst, not the programmer. Both jobs used to be distinct by the way.
I think you're confusing product and engineering. I get that programmers are smart so we just assume we can do every job, but it's a waste of your time and salary to talk extensively to customers and create product requirements. Let the PM's run the user research sessions, you can find more productive things to do.
However, where we agree, is that there is more to engineering than writing code. It's problem solving. Even if the product team, the c-suite, the board, the investors, et al, are all in on a product that they believe customers want, doesn't mean the real problem of bringing that idea to life at scale has been solved.
After 30+ years in the industry the absolute best programmers I know never spoke to any customers, like ever. so bullshit comment all around. I’ve been coding for 30+, have obscene salary and do not wear any “additional hats” or talk to any “customers.”
Writing code has a minimum IQ requirement; a significant fraction of the population will essentially never be able to code by themselves. That labor supply limitation is what's kept programmer salaries relatively high.
Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE or MechE work. Programmer salaries have been driven up by the ability to write-once-sell-globally and the dramatic profit margin difference between that and, say, producing chips where there's a much higher fixed cost due to the need for more real material, tooling, etc. Many of those roles require a much higher-than-baseline-skill, but it pulls up the compensation competition for almost everyone else too. (Though even then there are a lot of unglamorous, line-of-business, internal-tools-programming work that's not paid particularly well even in a lot of parts of the US far from the big tech companies.)
Salaries are a product of supply AND demand. Supply of good programmers and EE/MechE is low because it requires above average intelligence and a lot of education, while demand for software has been much higher than demand for EE/MechE.
Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part" is really telling on themselves. Coding was never "hard" because most organizations were absolutely unwilling to take on any technical work that was hard. That tells us about business strategy and culture rather than anything about the fundamentals of programming or technical work.
The real conclusion is that programming is such a high-leverage activity that even technically trivial, low-quality programming is immensely valuable economically. That's not going anywhere, but maybe LLMs are going to make it all that much cheaper. (Which is mostly great! But I really don't look forward to the painful debugging and maintenance that reams of shit code will push down on programmers.)
But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.
In an ideal world, making mediocre code cheaper should leave more room for taking on harder technical challenges. In reality, this has always been dictated far more by non-technical factors—culture, leadership, trust, risk tolerance...—than by anything intrinsic to programming. But, at least for now, we can use the LLM hype to motivate the kind of deeper technical work that always made sense but was too uncertain or too open-ended or too long-term for non-technical leadership.
And we should also drop the bullshit "code was never the hard part" framing.
I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.
This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.
>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements
I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either.
Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.
It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes.
Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.
The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms).
Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Understanding that your ideas are bad is hard.
You have clients with multiple devices connecting to your backend simultaneously, while you mediate their interactions with your partner systems. Their versions might not be up to date. It's a distributed system. When was the last time you cracked open a distributed systems textbook?
When was the last time you built a system and stared reality right in face, that is:
- can't trust your clocks
- pick 2/3 of CAP
- exactly-once delivery impossible
- the code will need to be altered and released without downtime
- hackers will try to exploit you for fun and profit
- your manager doesn't want you wasting time getting the above right
Those computing ideas (like distributed systems, concurrency and task scheduling) can even be found in even a single program/system. They are often entangled with even broader concepts, like visual layouts, security (authentication, authorization), communication and encryption, control systems, signal processing,… And those are often accidental complexity.
The essential complexity can be easily resolved by talking to domain experts. You will get a nice requirements document afterwards. That’s when the engineering and management concerns appear.
One of the strongest teams I worked with, working on an extremely large and ambitious project used to answer a lot of product/executive type questions regarding missing areas that we knew how to author and could safely assume general design consensus “it’s just typing”.
It was a very useful contraction in the right senior circles where there was a pretty good understanding of the meaning and decently reliable assumed consensus.
I eventually stoped using the phrase because it had started leaking deeper into the team and the impact on earlier career or less confident programmers was often no longer positive, it could be misinterpreted in lots of different ways but the most harmful was when it would further decimate confidence and discourage requests for help when something wasn’t obvious to the ultimate author.
As with almost every attempt to generalize in software engineering the repetition or extrapolation beyond the context in which it was intended can have negative side effects, it doesn’t matter if it’s a simple notion like “dry”, or a comment like “code was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers.
I guess my impression using these tools daily is that it hasn't diminished the need for my own technical expertise. The conversations I have with it are highly highly technical, and to me the insights come from both sides, I see things the LLM doesn't, and the LLM sees things I don't. It writes a lot of bugs that I have to spot, and writes designs that aren't correct. (This isn't a criticism, I do the same). I think the ideal world version of this stuff is complementary, but the current insane bubble economics mixed with the insane religious fervor make that unpalatable to the leading AI companies. (Like, I think Sam Altman said that anything below a trillion dollar IPO valuation is a "non-starter".) So, "nice coding tool", even if that's the BEST and most realistic outcome, is just not going to do it for them.
Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies to write "code".
Well-engineered code is hard. It still is. Code that is reliable, extensible, maintainable, scalable, legible, understandable is hard. Code where the specs and the "why" behind it were pressure-tested via thought and good intuition.
Unpopular opinion: I fully believe that anyone who says "code was never the hard part" was an irresponsible coder who perhaps never had to work for themselves.
No matter how long you spend on architecture, no matter how carefully you plan your features, if you are an actually good developer there are facts and decisions that emerge only from the first draft of the code — things that you could do better, broader ideas that suddenly emerge and change your view of your own work, abstractions that become possible once you internalise the project through writing it, realisations that a requirement is unscalable or unsafe, etc.
Nobody ever finds those things entirely in the planning stage: if it was easy, we'd all be doing waterfall development like 1970s consultants and none of those other ideas about coding would ever have emerged.
LLMs will just write the code. They will never have the rest of that experience. And I think any coder who doesn't have a visceral feel for what I said above is just bad at it.
Coding is easy if you enjoy doing it, met plenty of professional programmers that hated it and never felt the desire to improve. To them it was a way to get a paycheck that paid reasonably well.
Better to have a job you don't like that pays well than to have a job you don't like that pays poorly. But at the same time - if you're smart enough to program well enough to get paid while hating it it's such a shame to not find something you enjoy that will still pay you enough.
Is what he said wrong? Why don’t you attack his argument rather than his background. Not snark. I want to see the holes in what he says and I literally don’t care about who he is.
The arguments are couched in questions… which all either have ready answers or imply strawman arguments that few are making.
I suspect it’s emotional and indirect because the author understands how poor its arguments are. That leaves open the question of why do the blog post at all, but I guess bloggers have to blog, whether or not they’ve got anything to say. An angry, emotional, vague post probably gets a nice amount of views.
> I don't mean to imply there are no developers that simultaneously care deeply about the craft of software development and really empathize with the customer. I do believe they might want to see a professional about a split personality disorder, tho.
Well, this is also an insult.
Cleanest way I read this is seeing how basically none of it makes any sense for someone coding as a hobby, or in any non-business context.
This is not an article about coding, it’s a promotional piece for business stakeholders.
Nope, only those without a degree that cannot do anything else, e.g. the bricklayers on a building.
Real engineering has always been about talking with the multiple parties, organising architecture meetings, taking down requirements, if no infra team available setup the whole CI/CD pipeline, and so on.
Programming could be done in whatever language, or low code/no code tool, solved the business problem.
That depends on the quality of the degree. I was well served on my Software Engineering degree, coupled with the trader school in computing I went during high school.
Then naturally seniority teaches office politics, and what to actually invest time on.
"Code was never the hard part" misses the point but so does this blog post. This blog post from 2011 is worth reading and really cuts into the middle of the dreads-of-programmer.
Don’t call yourself a programmer: “Programmer” sounds like “anomalously high-cost peon who types some mumbo-jumbo into some other mumbo-jumbo.” If you call yourself a programmer, someone is already working on a way to get you fired. You know Salesforce, widely perceived among engineers to be a Software as a Services company? Their motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)
LLMs are the invention of the loom. Code is being industrialized.
Yes, there always will be artisinal weavers and a smaller number of them get paid a lot more money to do this by people who can afford it. Everyone else either started operating a loom or did something else.
Automated looms are now making mass amounts of textiles but the artisans are no longer doing the physical act of weaving. The artisans come up with cool designs, get feedback from customers, solve people's problems and outsource the rest (physical labor).
We are in the loom moment. Are you designing things people want? Are you doing the weaving? These two paths can coexist but they are diverging disciplines with diverging difficulties and diverging value.
Typing code into a computer is rapidly becoming physical labor now. The layer of creativity and problem solving is quickly raising to a level above the code since the code is a fluid now that comes and goes easily.
It seems so obvious that a non-tech company can benefit hugely from AI for their bespoke use case, especially if no one in the company knew how to write code pre-AI. But it's also easy to put some planks down across a stream and call it a bridge, that doesn't mean it's built well, going to last, or that there's no longer a need for structural engineers and architects.
It seems to me like two things can be (and are) true: programming can be hard in absolute terms, and is also the easy part of the thing that we call “software engineering.”
I feel like you're getting hung up in semantics such that your essay doesn't say the obvious: coding is "easy" relative to confidently knowing how and what to do next at every stage.
The comparison does not imply that coding is an easy thing to do, just that it's easier than being really, really good at the bigger picture.
What Carmack did wasn't hard because writing C is hard.
Is it just me, or is this article arguing against a straw-man?
Isn't the real argument that "writing code is not the hard part"? As in, reading and understanding is the hard part. Figuring out what and how to change is the hard part.
Writing is the last 1% that happens after you have already finished the 99% of talking to people, figuring out what needs to be built, building up context about the codebase and surrounding infrastructure in your heard, planning the actual changes.
what is -coding-? only typing down some code? the hard part is always the design part, reading doc, reading other code, understanding the sum of the parts, making choices, until the code to write is (quite) -obvious-.
Probably is a question of terms: there is two things: -design- and -coding- (but could be anything as: building, drilling, turning, traveling..) so to make things without a good design is the regal way to problems, many times is a problem left by others, and in a world more and more complex and fast-changing can only be more and more worst. Hard to say what part is really the hardest, but starting with a bad design is no good.
And now probably LLM will solve some problems, but for sure these tech will create more and more new ones.
This is dishonest. Nobody said "coding is easy" in a void. They said "code isn't the hard part" - in the context of LLMs. The obvious implication being that the actual speed of writing code wasn't the bottleneck. The implication is not that it's easy to think of what to write, or that any of the other parts of coding are easy.
Maybe the author has a skill issue, as they conflated "software engineering" with "coding".
It is all the parts of maintaining the software with time and engineering with all the moving parts (not the coding) is the point of why software engineering exists.
I think there is a de-facto distinction between different kind of programmers, we just need a clear names for them. Like, "builders" for folks who ship products and see code as an annoying intermediate step and "engineers" for people who build technically sound software.
> I don't mean to imply there are no developers that simultaneously care deeply about the craft of software development and really empathize with the customer. I do believe they might want to see a professional about a split personality disorder, tho.
This is a specific attitude I try to beat out of juniors. You will not be dismissive of the point of this exercise.
It is usually forgetting that everything can fail and will fail. And I mean everything. If it shouldn't fail it will at some point. And you should take that into account. And we usually don't until third or so time...
The author's primary misunderstanding in my opinion is that time consuming is being conflated with hard.
>If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
There is more to those roles than just coding. In fact the more expensive "programmers" often do not code themselves.
>Why was there so much stress, overwork and burnout even before AI started churning out 5000-line PRs?
Something being time consuming is different from something being hard. There are simple factory jobs that also demand overworking.
>Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it's so easy?
Building software takes time and since velocity is important companies wanted people who could increase velocity.
>If coding is easy, why do we have doorstoppers like Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer? Is The Art of Computer Programming a light summer read? Is SICP a coffee-table book? Why do we have bootcamps or even whole college degrees dedicated to it?
So authors can make money? Programming is learned by a ton of kids on their own there is no need for boot camps or college degrees just for the benefit of being able to program.
If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time? Why do we consider Fabrice Bellard a genius?
The earlier you are to a field the easier it is to have your impact recorded. In markets with first movie advantage being earlier also helps a lot. A lot of people were able to program so what made them earlier than others was not just being able to program.
>If coding is easy, why are people angry at AI (or anyone else) copying their code? Why do they act like they've poured their sweat, soul, and copious amounts of time into something so trivial?
Again something being time consuming doesn't mean it was hard.
>If coding is easy, why do many now feel like their identity and professional purpose are being stripped away from them?
When you spend a big percentage of your life doing something it becomes part of your identity regardless of difficulty.
>If coding is easy, why is software so damn buggy?
Because making bug free software takes a lot of time and resources. Those resources have a higher return on investment elsewhere.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless? Why aren't there rigorous 10-step interviews for them? Why aren't they getting paid more than the developers?
People are clueless because it is hard. Pay is not based off of difficulty.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why aren't market researchers, usability experts and—hell, customer success—considered rockstars in a software company? If “understanding the customer” is harder, why are business analysts looked down on as pencil pushers?
Because the company finds it cheaper to outsource? A ton of companies have their employees setting up and using telemetry to understand their customers so it's not a one dimensional thing.
>If implementation is easy and finding demand is harder, why are programmers upset when the salespeople promise a new feature to a customer to close the sale? They've found a genuine demand, something people will pay for!
Programming takes time and resources. These may have a higher return on investment elsewhere than this niche feature. It may make maintaining the entire product take more resources to support a niche feature.
>If coding is easy, why doesn't everyone just build ten variations of a thing and see which pans out?
Again building entire products takes a lot of resources. And 10x the cost of building every product is not going to be competitive in the market.
Code is the hard part if you are John Carmack or in a similar position where you have to squeeze every drop of performance from a hardware. That is the minority of programmers.
To be precise, it depends on the domain. The people who could actually write algorithms or core implementations were always a minority. Programmers like me mostly did copy-paste from Stack Overflow or assembled libraries.
It's not that code wasn't difficult—it really was.
In CRUD apps, about 70~80%of the work was building the same thing over and over, so once you got familiar with it, most of it was repetitive practice. But the number of people who could actually create something new was always small.
Most business programs had issues that arose in the application stage, the application layer. In this application layer, only a very small portion involved difficult logic. Most of it was just applied.
The problem is that people often romanticize the lower layers beyond their own, compilers and low level systems, calling that 'real programming,' and in doing so, they make programming seem harder than it is. In reality, the coding that most people make money from is mostly at the abstracted layers. The infrastructure beneath those layers is owned by giant corporations. If you work at one of those giants, that's fine. But beneath them are countless consumers paying those giants, and the coding that targets those consumers isn't that difficult.
In the end, whether coding was difficult or easy depends entirely on which layer you're working in.
What's certain is that coding was difficult, and it still is.
If you’re struggling at formal thinking, coding will be hard for you. I’m not talking about designing software with higher concepts, like thread, network IPC, web application routing, gui,… but more simpler one like basic data structures (list, tree, maps, graphs,…), algorithms (search, sort, balancing trees,…), and paradigms (procedural, functional, oop, relational,…).
I’ve met a lot of programmers where those concepts where only words and not something they have understood. A snippet of code is either something they have to learn or copy, it’s not something they can fluently manipulate. It’s the difference between having to use a dictionary and sample phrases and speaking the language fluently. The former is a chore, while you don’t even notice the latter.
That quotation is coming from programmers themselves.
Managers and execs aren’t saying this it’s the programmers and coders themselves making the claim that coding was never the hard part.
It is still an insult though. It’s an insult to themselves. It’s the lie all programmers including me tell themselves as reality itself insults us. Coding WAS the hard part.
That’s exactly what we were good at. Now our skills are getting owned by automation. How do we face reality shitting in our faces? We lie. We fabricate a reality that’s more acceptable. We frame our environment in a way that still validates our existence. If AI has invalidated all of my programming skill then I need to find something else to support my identity.
It's more accurate to say "code was only the worst bottleneck in a multi-bottleneck system". The second-worst bottleneck has been promoted to first. And it might be only marginally better.
Code generation was never the hard part. Knowing wtf you’re supposed to actually write was always much harder and this hasn’t changed. It’s not hard to write a loop or an if-statement. It’s hard to actually solve a problem with them at production scale. Carmack’s Fast Inverse Squareroot is not hard to write - it’s hard to figure out how to even do one in the first place. Writing it out is the easy part.
Claude writes 90% of my code but the bottlenecks always were and still are:
* getting clear requirements from product
* getting the damn code reviewed so I can merge it
Neither of these are fixed. Frankly, overuse of AI has made both of these worse. Claude brained product owners going hog wild with Claude Design are a nightmare to deal with, and the volume of absolute trash quality code being submitted for review is soul crushing.
No, using AI to automate code reviews is not acceptable. Code Review isn’t about a systematic checklist (though they can help) it’s about making sure people understand the actual changes being made to the system because it’s people who are accountable for what happens in production. LLMs can be part of the process of reviewing code but they suffer from the same issues as any other chatbot based tools (hallucinations, context confusion or not enough context, getting bogged down in impossible code paths or other minutia, etc…) so you have to review that review carefully too. Human judgment is still king.
These days my job is primarily reviewing offshore slop and making sure it’s in a good enough state to merge. I’m doing merge and release management way more than actually coding (and it sucks btw because I actually enjoy coding with or without agents). If the quality of the code turned in for me to review and merge is any indication, engineers/system architects are going to have their hands full.
It's a strange choice of something to take personally. It doesn't mean code is supposed to be easy for everyone at all times, just that past a certain point of your own personal path towards mastery the utility of not having to write code diminishes and the complications of delegating rise in proportion to the shrinking gains.
> If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless?
The divide between product managers and developers mimics the artificial divide between humanities and STEM.
You divide workers into competing groups, then make they outperform each other.
In reality, practically all humans can both become excellent coders and acquire deep product skills as well. We can also learn a wide variety of other skills in a single lifetime. The only blockers on that are social and psychological, you're meant to not believe that is possible.
All this talk about code in this adversarial role with product comes from that, and all of it dissolves under almost any valid critical angle. The engagement with this kind of discussion takes place exclusively in that aforementioned social layer.
Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.
There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.
It's interesting realizing how mind numbingly thoughtless my job has become.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind it if this was skilled work, but it just isn't.
Interesting take. Can you link us to your (correct, maybe even formally correct) AI-generated software? Given how general this post is, I assume you wouldn't mind if I extend this to, Idk, aviation or spaceflight, so mind linking to any GH repos you have where you've written code to work in environments like that? I ask because all you said was "making software" and didn't say what kind of "software" we're talking about.
Since you apparently work on this kind of software, here's a challenge for you: take the last several bugs that were reported and paste them into Fable, pointing it at your code.
How long does it take? Does it find the issue? In more or less time than the engineers took?
Ask it to review your code for design and cohesiveness issues. How does it do?
Can you link us to your git repo(s) and/or other artifacts that demonstrate this take? I and many other here I think won't agree, and we mostly love being taught.
I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers.
Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incredibly difficult and frustrating problem to solve. Especially if you need to also oversee the execution of the strategy. So not only you have to predict what they want or know the domain deeply enough to understand what they say they want is not what they really want, you also have to come up with a plan for executing your solution in a corporate environment.
There is a reason that books like "the staff engineer's path" cover topics such as local maximums, communication, establishing support for executing a plan or creating alignment on big efforts. In large corporate environments with multiple international customers, code is most of the time not the hardest problem.
> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place.
Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers. Either directly or worse. The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.
> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is. Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers.
That's like saying "building a car is not hard, building a real car that you can use and that passes regulation is".
IOW, writing code is hard in every reasonable context.
Your analogy breaks down because code is not heavily regulated as cars are.
This is worth saying precisely because of this difference - people see huge amounts of bad code generated by LLMs and think it is equivalent to carefully written code because the results look similar at first glance and they don’t bother to read it.
How many programmers operate under that kind of regulatory and operational constraint regime? I think most don’t.
(In interesting ways this is programming’s greatest boon and curse: if we treated it more like building bridges or cars, the world would be a very different place.)
Touch billing, touch medical data, be at a B2B company that needs to catch all the ISOs to have a chance to land bigger contracts. I don't think it's uncommon.
It might be an unpopular option, but I think the regulatory regimes that control medical and financial privacy as they interact with software are significantly lighter touch than e.g. the regimes that control material quality for bridges and tunnels, much less airplanes.
I think most do. You often sees that OSS often provide a disclaimer that they’re not liable for damages. You can’t easily do that when you provide a paid service. B2B often have SLA contracts that usually keeps everyone on their toes and not sling bugs right and left.
> Writing code is not hard. Writing correct code is.
Now add the time dimension - keeping code correct as the business and the people in it change.
That's how I explain to people that LLMs will not replace us developers.
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11241-from_managerial_feudalism_...
Timestamp is: 36:42-39:55
I believe Graeber perfectly predicts the problems, in 2019, with vibe coding creating immediate "value" from production, but failing to produce true value through maintaining the system (like one continually washes a cup to give it value over time).
Maintenance over time is 90% of the work anyways, you don't start a project from scratch every day
Exactly. Writing code is easy. Junior developers do it all the time. Hell, they write far mode code and do it faster!
I go half the speed of a junior developer, but the code I write lasts five years to a decade with an order of magnitude or two fewer bugs and long-term maintenance burden.
> Either directly or worse.
Wow, some "the killer is calling from inside the house" vibes right there. But I totally agree that the game of telephone has always been _an_ issue - maybe not _the_ issue but certainly a big one.
> The gigantic salaries paid to the most prolific employees is not due to their ability to write code. It is due to their ability to interrogate the shit out of the customer until they finally reveal the true requirements.
That doesn’t describe any devs I know, especially not in the old days. Interrogating customers and bringing back requirements was the job of management (who got big salaries, too.)
Agree. What a strange perspective. Engineering is what is hard, and that includes coding and non-coding activities but doesn’t require customer interrogation.
Not in agency or consulting jobs.
> Writing code is not hard.
Nobody is arguing that typing lines of code on a computer is hard.
However, when it's the AI that does the thinking in place of the programmer, it's not "the engineer writing correct code" anymore since the engineer...isn't engineering, it's the AI that becomes the engineer. period.
> Knowing what is correct in a setting with paying customers generally involves interacting with those customers.
Plenty of programmers never interact with the customer, this is the job of the analyst, not the programmer. Both jobs used to be distinct by the way.
I think you're confusing product and engineering. I get that programmers are smart so we just assume we can do every job, but it's a waste of your time and salary to talk extensively to customers and create product requirements. Let the PM's run the user research sessions, you can find more productive things to do.
However, where we agree, is that there is more to engineering than writing code. It's problem solving. Even if the product team, the c-suite, the board, the investors, et al, are all in on a product that they believe customers want, doesn't mean the real problem of bringing that idea to life at scale has been solved.
After 30+ years in the industry the absolute best programmers I know never spoke to any customers, like ever. so bullshit comment all around. I’ve been coding for 30+, have obscene salary and do not wear any “additional hats” or talk to any “customers.”
Understanding requirements means talking to customers. A customer can be anyone, even other devs that consume your code/product.
>Writing code is not hard.
Writing code has a minimum IQ requirement; a significant fraction of the population will essentially never be able to code by themselves. That labor supply limitation is what's kept programmer salaries relatively high.
Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE or MechE work. Programmer salaries have been driven up by the ability to write-once-sell-globally and the dramatic profit margin difference between that and, say, producing chips where there's a much higher fixed cost due to the need for more real material, tooling, etc. Many of those roles require a much higher-than-baseline-skill, but it pulls up the compensation competition for almost everyone else too. (Though even then there are a lot of unglamorous, line-of-business, internal-tools-programming work that's not paid particularly well even in a lot of parts of the US far from the big tech companies.)
Salaries are a product of supply AND demand. Supply of good programmers and EE/MechE is low because it requires above average intelligence and a lot of education, while demand for software has been much higher than demand for EE/MechE.
>Writing code doesn't have a notably higher (if at all higher, vs lower!) IQ requirement compared to some of the basic components of EE
Average IQ of Electrical Engineers: 121
https://www.iqcareerlab.com/tools/iq-for-profession/electric...
...which is the top 10% of the population.
https://www.desperateminds.com/blog/iq-120.html
I'm not insulted. I actually agree with that even when I was doing some more "hardcore" low level system programming.
Figuring out what code to write and what not to write was always hard.
The code would come out easier the more time I spent thinking and designing and talking about it with others.
of course, YMMV
Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part" is really telling on themselves. Coding was never "hard" because most organizations were absolutely unwilling to take on any technical work that was hard. That tells us about business strategy and culture rather than anything about the fundamentals of programming or technical work.
The real conclusion is that programming is such a high-leverage activity that even technically trivial, low-quality programming is immensely valuable economically. That's not going anywhere, but maybe LLMs are going to make it all that much cheaper. (Which is mostly great! But I really don't look forward to the painful debugging and maintenance that reams of shit code will push down on programmers.)
But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.
In an ideal world, making mediocre code cheaper should leave more room for taking on harder technical challenges. In reality, this has always been dictated far more by non-technical factors—culture, leadership, trust, risk tolerance...—than by anything intrinsic to programming. But, at least for now, we can use the LLM hype to motivate the kind of deeper technical work that always made sense but was too uncertain or too open-ended or too long-term for non-technical leadership.
And we should also drop the bullshit "code was never the hard part" framing.
It is hardly any different from reviewing or debugging the code quality of most offshore deliveries.
I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.
No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.
You forgot "as long as"
... as long as the buyers could never discern
This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.
>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements
Development is essentially becoming management.
I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either.
Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.
It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes.
Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.
Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem.
Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again.
We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer
The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms).
Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Understanding that your ideas are bad is hard.
You have clients with multiple devices connecting to your backend simultaneously, while you mediate their interactions with your partner systems. Their versions might not be up to date. It's a distributed system. When was the last time you cracked open a distributed systems textbook?
When was the last time you built a system and stared reality right in face, that is: - can't trust your clocks - pick 2/3 of CAP - exactly-once delivery impossible - the code will need to be altered and released without downtime - hackers will try to exploit you for fun and profit - your manager doesn't want you wasting time getting the above right
Coding is the easy bit.
Nope, coding was still the hard bit. Every failing programmer would jump into architects or prod management but not the opposite way.
Usually you don't have an option other than leaving, most organisations don't let seniors keep coding and nothing else.
Either move up the ladder or leave.
Those computing ideas (like distributed systems, concurrency and task scheduling) can even be found in even a single program/system. They are often entangled with even broader concepts, like visual layouts, security (authentication, authorization), communication and encryption, control systems, signal processing,… And those are often accidental complexity.
The essential complexity can be easily resolved by talking to domain experts. You will get a nice requirements document afterwards. That’s when the engineering and management concerns appear.
One of the strongest teams I worked with, working on an extremely large and ambitious project used to answer a lot of product/executive type questions regarding missing areas that we knew how to author and could safely assume general design consensus “it’s just typing”.
It was a very useful contraction in the right senior circles where there was a pretty good understanding of the meaning and decently reliable assumed consensus.
I eventually stoped using the phrase because it had started leaking deeper into the team and the impact on earlier career or less confident programmers was often no longer positive, it could be misinterpreted in lots of different ways but the most harmful was when it would further decimate confidence and discourage requests for help when something wasn’t obvious to the ultimate author.
As with almost every attempt to generalize in software engineering the repetition or extrapolation beyond the context in which it was intended can have negative side effects, it doesn’t matter if it’s a simple notion like “dry”, or a comment like “code was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers.
Coding while definitely not easy, it was never the hard part.
The hard part has always been how to solve x problem. Coding is the last piece of that part, which while not easy is not the hardest.
The art of computer programming books are not about coding they are about computer science, i.e. figuring out how to compute solutions to problems.
Figuring out what to build is definitely not the hard part though.
I always said programming is 80% thinking and only 20% coding.
nothing has changed since then.
I guess my impression using these tools daily is that it hasn't diminished the need for my own technical expertise. The conversations I have with it are highly highly technical, and to me the insights come from both sides, I see things the LLM doesn't, and the LLM sees things I don't. It writes a lot of bugs that I have to spot, and writes designs that aren't correct. (This isn't a criticism, I do the same). I think the ideal world version of this stuff is complementary, but the current insane bubble economics mixed with the insane religious fervor make that unpalatable to the leading AI companies. (Like, I think Sam Altman said that anything below a trillion dollar IPO valuation is a "non-starter".) So, "nice coding tool", even if that's the BEST and most realistic outcome, is just not going to do it for them.
Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies to write "code".
Well-engineered code is hard. It still is. Code that is reliable, extensible, maintainable, scalable, legible, understandable is hard. Code where the specs and the "why" behind it were pressure-tested via thought and good intuition.
Unpopular opinion: I fully believe that anyone who says "code was never the hard part" was an irresponsible coder who perhaps never had to work for themselves.
No matter how long you spend on architecture, no matter how carefully you plan your features, if you are an actually good developer there are facts and decisions that emerge only from the first draft of the code — things that you could do better, broader ideas that suddenly emerge and change your view of your own work, abstractions that become possible once you internalise the project through writing it, realisations that a requirement is unscalable or unsafe, etc.
Nobody ever finds those things entirely in the planning stage: if it was easy, we'd all be doing waterfall development like 1970s consultants and none of those other ideas about coding would ever have emerged.
LLMs will just write the code. They will never have the rest of that experience. And I think any coder who doesn't have a visceral feel for what I said above is just bad at it.
Coding is easy if you enjoy doing it, met plenty of professional programmers that hated it and never felt the desire to improve. To them it was a way to get a paycheck that paid reasonably well.
Better to have a job you don't like that pays well than to have a job you don't like that pays poorly. But at the same time - if you're smart enough to program well enough to get paid while hating it it's such a shame to not find something you enjoy that will still pay you enough.
Starts with a rant that appeals to hardcore programmers and then tells them to adapt.
Of course he is an AI consultant among other things.
OP here. You're absolutely right, I just want to add that "other things" include being a programmer since the nineties :)
Edit to add: instead of "adapt" (which would imply "embrace AI", which I didn't say), my intent was more along the lines of "be adaptable."
Is what he said wrong? Why don’t you attack his argument rather than his background. Not snark. I want to see the holes in what he says and I literally don’t care about who he is.
You must be anti ai among other things.
Coding is not programming.
Typing code is indeed not the hard part, programming is.
A pretty weak essay.
The arguments are couched in questions… which all either have ready answers or imply strawman arguments that few are making.
I suspect it’s emotional and indirect because the author understands how poor its arguments are. That leaves open the question of why do the blog post at all, but I guess bloggers have to blog, whether or not they’ve got anything to say. An angry, emotional, vague post probably gets a nice amount of views.
> I don't mean to imply there are no developers that simultaneously care deeply about the craft of software development and really empathize with the customer. I do believe they might want to see a professional about a split personality disorder, tho.
Well, this is also an insult.
Cleanest way I read this is seeing how basically none of it makes any sense for someone coding as a hobby, or in any non-business context.
This is not an article about coding, it’s a promotional piece for business stakeholders.
Nope, only those without a degree that cannot do anything else, e.g. the bricklayers on a building.
Real engineering has always been about talking with the multiple parties, organising architecture meetings, taking down requirements, if no infra team available setup the whole CI/CD pipeline, and so on.
Programming could be done in whatever language, or low code/no code tool, solved the business problem.
Now what will remain to humans is a big question.
It's not even about the degree. Fresh computer science graduates already know how to code but can't do the senior developer stuff.
https://www.nair.sh/guides-and-opinions/communicating-your-e...
That depends on the quality of the degree. I was well served on my Software Engineering degree, coupled with the trader school in computing I went during high school.
Then naturally seniority teaches office politics, and what to actually invest time on.
Well said.
Oh really? I thought the language needed to be ALGOL on a Burroughs B6700!
If it solves the business case. A proper engineer would actually recognise that should be NEWP in 2026.
"Code was never the hard part" misses the point but so does this blog post. This blog post from 2011 is worth reading and really cuts into the middle of the dreads-of-programmer.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
Good post!
> There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people.
Occasionally I see a tech person in SV upset about AI automating away jobs. My dude, your whole job is to automate away jobs.
LLMs are the invention of the loom. Code is being industrialized.
Yes, there always will be artisinal weavers and a smaller number of them get paid a lot more money to do this by people who can afford it. Everyone else either started operating a loom or did something else.
Automated looms are now making mass amounts of textiles but the artisans are no longer doing the physical act of weaving. The artisans come up with cool designs, get feedback from customers, solve people's problems and outsource the rest (physical labor).
We are in the loom moment. Are you designing things people want? Are you doing the weaving? These two paths can coexist but they are diverging disciplines with diverging difficulties and diverging value.
Typing code into a computer is rapidly becoming physical labor now. The layer of creativity and problem solving is quickly raising to a level above the code since the code is a fluid now that comes and goes easily.
Easy on the cocaine. There are no credible AI code bases on GitHub.
nah. my company (not a tech company)'s stack is ai generated and it has created credible value.
It seems so obvious that a non-tech company can benefit hugely from AI for their bespoke use case, especially if no one in the company knew how to write code pre-AI. But it's also easy to put some planks down across a stream and call it a bridge, that doesn't mean it's built well, going to last, or that there's no longer a need for structural engineers and architects.
It seems to me like two things can be (and are) true: programming can be hard in absolute terms, and is also the easy part of the thing that we call “software engineering.”
Since not everyone seems to be familiar with human communication:
The phrase "X is the hard part" means that X is the hardest part, not that all the other parts are easy.
I feel like you're getting hung up in semantics such that your essay doesn't say the obvious: coding is "easy" relative to confidently knowing how and what to do next at every stage.
The comparison does not imply that coding is an easy thing to do, just that it's easier than being really, really good at the bigger picture.
What Carmack did wasn't hard because writing C is hard.
Is it just me, or is this article arguing against a straw-man?
Isn't the real argument that "writing code is not the hard part"? As in, reading and understanding is the hard part. Figuring out what and how to change is the hard part.
Writing is the last 1% that happens after you have already finished the 99% of talking to people, figuring out what needs to be built, building up context about the codebase and surrounding infrastructure in your heard, planning the actual changes.
what is -coding-? only typing down some code? the hard part is always the design part, reading doc, reading other code, understanding the sum of the parts, making choices, until the code to write is (quite) -obvious-.
Probably is a question of terms: there is two things: -design- and -coding- (but could be anything as: building, drilling, turning, traveling..) so to make things without a good design is the regal way to problems, many times is a problem left by others, and in a world more and more complex and fast-changing can only be more and more worst. Hard to say what part is really the hardest, but starting with a bad design is no good.
And now probably LLM will solve some problems, but for sure these tech will create more and more new ones.
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf
This is dishonest. Nobody said "coding is easy" in a void. They said "code isn't the hard part" - in the context of LLMs. The obvious implication being that the actual speed of writing code wasn't the bottleneck. The implication is not that it's easy to think of what to write, or that any of the other parts of coding are easy.
Maybe the author has a skill issue, as they conflated "software engineering" with "coding".
It is all the parts of maintaining the software with time and engineering with all the moving parts (not the coding) is the point of why software engineering exists.
I think there is a de-facto distinction between different kind of programmers, we just need a clear names for them. Like, "builders" for folks who ship products and see code as an annoying intermediate step and "engineers" for people who build technically sound software.
Or put differently: code as a means to an end vs code as the end. You need both types, the ratio changes as things change, neither is The Way.
> I don't mean to imply there are no developers that simultaneously care deeply about the craft of software development and really empathize with the customer. I do believe they might want to see a professional about a split personality disorder, tho.
This is a specific attitude I try to beat out of juniors. You will not be dismissive of the point of this exercise.
> If coding is easy, why is software so damn buggy?
Debugging is hard.
And people are very lazy; test one ideal path, works, done.
It is usually forgetting that everything can fail and will fail. And I mean everything. If it shouldn't fail it will at some point. And you should take that into account. And we usually don't until third or so time...
The author's primary misunderstanding in my opinion is that time consuming is being conflated with hard.
>If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
There is more to those roles than just coding. In fact the more expensive "programmers" often do not code themselves.
>Why was there so much stress, overwork and burnout even before AI started churning out 5000-line PRs?
Something being time consuming is different from something being hard. There are simple factory jobs that also demand overworking.
>Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it's so easy?
Building software takes time and since velocity is important companies wanted people who could increase velocity.
>If coding is easy, why do we have doorstoppers like Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer? Is The Art of Computer Programming a light summer read? Is SICP a coffee-table book? Why do we have bootcamps or even whole college degrees dedicated to it?
So authors can make money? Programming is learned by a ton of kids on their own there is no need for boot camps or college degrees just for the benefit of being able to program.
If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time? Why do we consider Fabrice Bellard a genius?
The earlier you are to a field the easier it is to have your impact recorded. In markets with first movie advantage being earlier also helps a lot. A lot of people were able to program so what made them earlier than others was not just being able to program.
>If coding is easy, why are people angry at AI (or anyone else) copying their code? Why do they act like they've poured their sweat, soul, and copious amounts of time into something so trivial?
Again something being time consuming doesn't mean it was hard.
>If coding is easy, why do many now feel like their identity and professional purpose are being stripped away from them?
When you spend a big percentage of your life doing something it becomes part of your identity regardless of difficulty.
>If coding is easy, why is software so damn buggy?
Because making bug free software takes a lot of time and resources. Those resources have a higher return on investment elsewhere.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless? Why aren't there rigorous 10-step interviews for them? Why aren't they getting paid more than the developers?
People are clueless because it is hard. Pay is not based off of difficulty.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why aren't market researchers, usability experts and—hell, customer success—considered rockstars in a software company? If “understanding the customer” is harder, why are business analysts looked down on as pencil pushers?
Because the company finds it cheaper to outsource? A ton of companies have their employees setting up and using telemetry to understand their customers so it's not a one dimensional thing.
>If implementation is easy and finding demand is harder, why are programmers upset when the salespeople promise a new feature to a customer to close the sale? They've found a genuine demand, something people will pay for!
Programming takes time and resources. These may have a higher return on investment elsewhere than this niche feature. It may make maintaining the entire product take more resources to support a niche feature.
>If coding is easy, why doesn't everyone just build ten variations of a thing and see which pans out?
Again building entire products takes a lot of resources. And 10x the cost of building every product is not going to be competitive in the market.
Code is the hard part if you are John Carmack or in a similar position where you have to squeeze every drop of performance from a hardware. That is the minority of programmers.
I don't think that is true. coding at a baseline is hard no matter what. If it was easy everyone could have done it, and clearly that isn't true.
Now there is hard-er coding. Novel algorithms, performance sensitive stuff, and so on.
No, code was always difficult.
To be precise, it depends on the domain. The people who could actually write algorithms or core implementations were always a minority. Programmers like me mostly did copy-paste from Stack Overflow or assembled libraries.
It's not that code wasn't difficult—it really was.
In CRUD apps, about 70~80%of the work was building the same thing over and over, so once you got familiar with it, most of it was repetitive practice. But the number of people who could actually create something new was always small.
Most business programs had issues that arose in the application stage, the application layer. In this application layer, only a very small portion involved difficult logic. Most of it was just applied.
The problem is that people often romanticize the lower layers beyond their own, compilers and low level systems, calling that 'real programming,' and in doing so, they make programming seem harder than it is. In reality, the coding that most people make money from is mostly at the abstracted layers. The infrastructure beneath those layers is owned by giant corporations. If you work at one of those giants, that's fine. But beneath them are countless consumers paying those giants, and the coding that targets those consumers isn't that difficult.
In the end, whether coding was difficult or easy depends entirely on which layer you're working in.
What's certain is that coding was difficult, and it still is.
If you’re struggling at formal thinking, coding will be hard for you. I’m not talking about designing software with higher concepts, like thread, network IPC, web application routing, gui,… but more simpler one like basic data structures (list, tree, maps, graphs,…), algorithms (search, sort, balancing trees,…), and paradigms (procedural, functional, oop, relational,…).
I’ve met a lot of programmers where those concepts where only words and not something they have understood. A snippet of code is either something they have to learn or copy, it’s not something they can fluently manipulate. It’s the difference between having to use a dictionary and sample phrases and speaking the language fluently. The former is a chore, while you don’t even notice the latter.
That quotation is coming from programmers themselves.
Managers and execs aren’t saying this it’s the programmers and coders themselves making the claim that coding was never the hard part.
It is still an insult though. It’s an insult to themselves. It’s the lie all programmers including me tell themselves as reality itself insults us. Coding WAS the hard part.
That’s exactly what we were good at. Now our skills are getting owned by automation. How do we face reality shitting in our faces? We lie. We fabricate a reality that’s more acceptable. We frame our environment in a way that still validates our existence. If AI has invalidated all of my programming skill then I need to find something else to support my identity.
It's more accurate to say "code was only the worst bottleneck in a multi-bottleneck system". The second-worst bottleneck has been promoted to first. And it might be only marginally better.
Code generation was never the hard part. Knowing wtf you’re supposed to actually write was always much harder and this hasn’t changed. It’s not hard to write a loop or an if-statement. It’s hard to actually solve a problem with them at production scale. Carmack’s Fast Inverse Squareroot is not hard to write - it’s hard to figure out how to even do one in the first place. Writing it out is the easy part.
Claude writes 90% of my code but the bottlenecks always were and still are:
* getting clear requirements from product
* getting the damn code reviewed so I can merge it
Neither of these are fixed. Frankly, overuse of AI has made both of these worse. Claude brained product owners going hog wild with Claude Design are a nightmare to deal with, and the volume of absolute trash quality code being submitted for review is soul crushing.
No, using AI to automate code reviews is not acceptable. Code Review isn’t about a systematic checklist (though they can help) it’s about making sure people understand the actual changes being made to the system because it’s people who are accountable for what happens in production. LLMs can be part of the process of reviewing code but they suffer from the same issues as any other chatbot based tools (hallucinations, context confusion or not enough context, getting bogged down in impossible code paths or other minutia, etc…) so you have to review that review carefully too. Human judgment is still king.
These days my job is primarily reviewing offshore slop and making sure it’s in a good enough state to merge. I’m doing merge and release management way more than actually coding (and it sucks btw because I actually enjoy coding with or without agents). If the quality of the code turned in for me to review and merge is any indication, engineers/system architects are going to have their hands full.
It's a strange choice of something to take personally. It doesn't mean code is supposed to be easy for everyone at all times, just that past a certain point of your own personal path towards mastery the utility of not having to write code diminishes and the complications of delegating rise in proportion to the shrinking gains.
Exactly! Try reading a large C code base.
> If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless?
The divide between product managers and developers mimics the artificial divide between humanities and STEM.
You divide workers into competing groups, then make they outperform each other.
In reality, practically all humans can both become excellent coders and acquire deep product skills as well. We can also learn a wide variety of other skills in a single lifetime. The only blockers on that are social and psychological, you're meant to not believe that is possible.
All this talk about code in this adversarial role with product comes from that, and all of it dissolves under almost any valid critical angle. The engagement with this kind of discussion takes place exclusively in that aforementioned social layer.
TL;DR weak bait
Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.
There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.
It's interesting realizing how mind numbingly thoughtless my job has become.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind it if this was skilled work, but it just isn't.
Interesting take. Can you link us to your (correct, maybe even formally correct) AI-generated software? Given how general this post is, I assume you wouldn't mind if I extend this to, Idk, aviation or spaceflight, so mind linking to any GH repos you have where you've written code to work in environments like that? I ask because all you said was "making software" and didn't say what kind of "software" we're talking about.
Since you apparently work on this kind of software, here's a challenge for you: take the last several bugs that were reported and paste them into Fable, pointing it at your code.
How long does it take? Does it find the issue? In more or less time than the engineers took?
Ask it to review your code for design and cohesiveness issues. How does it do?
Can you link us to your git repo(s) and/or other artifacts that demonstrate this take? I and many other here I think won't agree, and we mostly love being taught.
Nope. I don't code for fun, and my employer will be very unhappy if I start sending people private repos.
/s