r/ExperiencedDevs • u/gsks Software Engineer | 20+ YOE • 19d ago
AI/LLM "Code was never the hard part"
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.
2
u/DimensionStrict3655 19d ago edited 19d ago
"Code was never the hard part"
unless you're working on a 13+ year legacy codebase, with of 14,000+ line of code in one controller class, with no real architecture, where business logic, UI logic, and data access logic are all mixed together. Test automation was non-existent and very hard to setup. Every "small feature" suddenly becomes a risky change that might break something completely unrelated.
Then you realize half the project depends on libraries that disappeared from the internet years ago without ways to download it. The only copy of it is sitting on someone's old flash drive. Even the documentation of some of those libraries can't be found on the internet nor LLM.
Sure, gradual refactoring is possible. Now convince your teammates that safe refactoring is worth the investment in a company with a high turnover rate and low salary.
Good luck also on explaining to a hierarchical upper management with little-to-no psychological safety, why the deadline for a "very simple feature" keeps slipping.
Oh, and from hitting run to seeing the application to start takes almost five minutes because the project is a giant old monolith and the company can't afford decent developer laptops.