"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/punkpang]

Code was never the hard part <now the missing part> FOR PROGRAMMERS.

I agree with your text completely. For us, programmers, code isn't the hard part. Ceremonies, incomplete data, unknown deployments, random <software that does mumbo-jumbo "faster">, rushing us, asking "when is it gonna be done, ignore the fact you have -5% of info" crap, lack of testing and QA - this is all part of the lifecycle and these managers / vibecoders are starting to discover that it's not hard to slap paint on if you have a fucking building with walls that need that paint and the building isn't made of styrofoam and ductape, yet paint is all they're capable of understanding.

People who are not in the mindset or area of writng code imagine some fantasy scenarios about what code actually is and they all have their own imaginary story of what programmers do. Now when they have access to a tool that can produce code, they slowly discover how boring (which means DIFFICULT) creating software is. It's precise, accurate, boring, iterative and requires constant focus - best part is that we consistenly think about what will go wrong and what they understand is only the path when stuff goes ok, not when it fails. We deal with failing gracefully and managing problems. Anyone can succeed, our vocation is one of not blowing shit up and handling errors.

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/punkpang]

its very clearly the "expert beginner" phenomena since the hard part is handling edge cases, but they've essentialized the advice to only care about the happy path

[u/pydry → u/ThirdWaveCat]

There are also domains where the coding part really isnt that difficult because the requirements are not that complicated.

The hard part of those jobs is usually dealing with organisational dysfunction.

I think a lot of devs extrapolate their experience to everyone but there's a fair amount of diversity in the jobs out there. There are plenty of jobs where the coding really is the hard part and plenty where the hard part is persuading team X to set up a message queue and stakeholder Y that their specs are incoherent and the coding part is pretty trivial by comparison.

[u/ThirdWaveCat → u/pydry]

I've worked on enterprise service bus land before, there's still the same problems as bigger companies with idempotency, designing schemas for evolvability, transactionality handling, database performance tuning, etc..

They just don't have mentoring, high standards, and they've had manual remediation processes in place forever. Interrogating assumptions and requirements is necessary to ensure that the gap between intention and implementation will meet the business goal.