To be fair, the use of absolutes like "never" is a red flag. If the statement were "code is often not the hardest part", that's certainly plausible and debatable depending on context. The implication that coding is easy is what's offensive.

Has been true my whole career as a freelance web developer.

It's been mostly gathering requirements, trying to understand why something was getting build and chasing clients to get paid.

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

high demand, low supply.

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

In my experience the complexity of the coding challenges tackled correlates well with the talent of the engineers.

It is uncommon to find engineers doing work they find trivial outside of some consulting niches.

Writing code to do a thing is easy.

Writing code that's logical and easy to follow, that can be extended in several likely dimensions without major plumbing work, and that doesn't contain "gotchas" for the maintainer, is not at all easy.

depends on the industry. but in consulting the hard part is dealing with customers who dont understand their own business and analysts who think writing software is rote factory work but somehow struggle to write a handful of coherent user stories not littered with subjective and ambiguous language

these two groups are telling me my time is numbered because of llm and ai when in-fact im struggling to see how ai doesnt replace them both

really good software engineers are expected to be experts in their job and that of the rest of the project team, these individuals are primed to be empowered by ai in a really disruptive way.

i’d bet half of my normie programming career was spent capturing requirements, understanding the target domain problems etc for easy normal web development. once that is done code is a grocery list for 90% of it

I think it can be pretty hard. It can be hard to find the right fit/abstractions.

LLMs don't fix that though. I see some truly awful code come out of them. And no, it's not just better context or use more skillz.md.

I think "code isn't the bottleneck" is often accurate though in organisations with high friction processes.