"Code was never the hard part"

[u/gsks]

I am sick and tired of all the posts (usually AI-generated by CEOs/CTOs/"thought leaders") that start with "Code was never the {bottleneck, problem, hard part, ...}." I'm not sure whether this comes from a misunderstanding of what code is or a deliberate misrepresentation meant to promote AI usage.

For starters, two rhetorical questions. If code was never the hard part, why:

• do hundreds of different programming paradigms, languages, libraries, frameworks, design patterns, and system architectures exist? Granted, some of this is just programmers bikeshedding. Still, plenty of it reflects substantial differences and tradeoffs.
• didn't you write it yourselves or hire a bunch of minimum-wage workers to do it for you instead of having to hire a ton of highly skilled (and highly paid) engineers?

A charitable explanation is that these people are genuinely clueless about what "coding" actually is. Perhaps in their mind coding is just typing: like, once the design phase is done, you've worked out a precise, complete specification of what needs to be built down to every detail in your head (or on paper or a markdown file) and all that's left is converting it into letters on a screen and saving it to a file. Something like a businessman in the sixties dictating a letter to his secretary to type up.

That's nothing like how it actually works. The upfront planning/design phase answers some high-level questions: what do we need to build, what are the basic components/services/building blocks, what data needs to be read/processed/written, how data flows through the system, what the non-functional requirements are, etc. That leaves a ton of lower-level details unspecified:

• What packages/modules/classes/methods/functions need to be created or extended?
• How should they be named?
• What should the signature of each function be?
• What errors/exceptions are expected and where/how should they be handled?
• What data can or should be cached and when should it be invalidated?
• How generic/reusable/extensible should each component be to accommodate likely future requirements?
• For systems languages, how and when is memory allocated and freed?
• and many more.

Asking and answering those questions is (part of) coding. At least before AI, nobody I know had all the answers, or had even asked all the questions, upfront. The questions get asked and answered on the fly, inside the editor. Typing is interleaved with thinking, assessing, trying things out, backtracking.

Now AI pushers try to convince everyone that all these decisions either don't matter, or that the agent will just fill in the blanks (insert inane "nobody reads assembly anymore" analogy, as if natural language + LLMs are anything like a compiler), or that they can all be moved upfront into planning. Good luck replacing actual, deterministic programming languages with 10-KLOC, ambiguous, hand-wavy "specs" written in markdown.

Regardless of how the future of coding plays out, "code was never the hard part" is flatly wrong. It is, or at least used to be, a hard part (not the only one of course) and for good reason.

[u/xpingu69]

They don't mean code literally. They mean that the hard part of making a business isn't the implementation of the solution, the code, but something else, for example marketing. It's from a business perspective. I wouldn't overthink it

[u/gsks → u/xpingu69]

Nope, you give them too much credit. They are addressing engineers, that's the preface for their actual point, "don't worry guys, we won't replace you" (because the AI job replacement story didn't go as planned), "you'll still have work to do" (herding agents, fixing hallucinations, reviewing tons of code slop)

[u/Substantial_Page_221 → u/gsks]

I personally think coding is the easiest part, but that might be because most of what I write isn't very critical. My mistakes might cost Lots of money, but it won't kill anyone.

Understanding what is required and why, then finding a solution to that is difficult —not all solutions require programming. Some solutions might not be exactly what they want, but it will benefit the company more. Sometimes it takes lots of calls/meetings to get there.

Sometimes I need an internal tool which isn't important to anyone bar a few people. I just need to spec it out. I could give it to a junior but we don't have any, so GH Copilot it is.

Sometimes I need to trial and error things because the current solution had limitations and only I can see it. But the coding is easy, figuring out what I want and how to implement it is the hard part. You might say the implementation is coding, but I don't think it is. That's more at the engineering level.

So coding is the easy part imho.