Almost all of us would agree if this was just better articulated:

"Code was never the hardest part."

There you go. Doesn't imply that coding is easy.

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.

> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?

There's probably a lot wrong with the "coding was never the hard part" take, but this quote right here shows that the author is not willing to engage with the actual idea that folks who say this are espousing. Because if the author was discussing these ideas on good faith, he'd know that the answer is obvious: there's much, much more to a software engineer's job than just coding, and that other stuff is very hard to do well, and people pay for that.

Again, I'm not saying the "coding was never the hard part" folks are right, but I really, really hate straw men.

do you know how many eBay clones were out there after Ricardo? how many people built twitter clones? building the website was never the hard part, making people get to it and use it was always the costly and hard part. nobody talks about embedded device programming when they say code was never the hard part.

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.

Coding is just a small part of a modern software engineers job. And some may think it isn’t the hardest part.

This is the kind of thing where everyone just talks past each other because "coding" can refer to a ton of different things. I think we've all had the experience of having to write large mechanical boilerplate or refractors which was definitely highly automatable coding. I think we've also all has the experience of being utterly dismayed at how hard it is to write certain logic, especially with LLM "assistance". I've spent the last couple days marveling at how consistently fable introduces race conditions into a complex state machine I'm maintaining. Coding can be hard, or easy sometimes

This post misses the point about what has changed. It's not that coding is or was easy, it's that coding is _more than typing code_.

Typing is easy. Coding is hard. LLMs eliminate the typing and aid with all the other parts of writing code (where is the system that I want to mutate, how does it work today, debate the tradeoffs inherent in the potential plans of action).

What remains after factoring out the typing and the time spent assembling an understanding of code is opportunity cost. That's not an insult any more than memory managers are an insult to languages like C.

The author is conflating coding with other parts of the sw engineer role.

Typing up English language logic into code hasn’t been a job for 40 years.

That’s what people mean by this.