The literal writing of the code was hard. This revisionism about how we were all secretly shakespeare typing monkey scammers pulling the wool over the eyes of the economy drives me nuts. Choosing which words to put in the editor, how to express all these ideas in a limited syntax. That was the big skill.

Sure, writing a program that makes a machine kind of do something was easy. Lots of people can do that. But then you ship a mobile app to a billion users and discover that people are genuinely wired differently.

different cultures, different mental models, different expectations

Now you have to accommodate and express all of that complexity in a language whose only reader is a machine that tolerates zero ambiguity. And you have to do it in a way that other engineers can read, reason about, and build on top of without the whole thing exploding. That's not requirements gathering. Its literally writing it down

You're doing the thing where you read code like a fish breathes water and conclude it was easy to write. You can read a Nobel Prize novel in a weekend too. The readability is the achievement, not evidence it was trivial.

Edit: I got pretty heated about this and wrote up a proper rebuttal: https://promptless.ai/blog/technical/writing-code-was-hard-a...