alt Hacker News> it was an extremely hard engineering problem
But that is not programming then? Doing voice recognition in the 90s, missile guidance systems, you name it, those are hard things, but it's not the "programming" that's hard. It's the figuring out how to do it. The algorithms, the strategy, etc.
I might be misunderstanding, but I cannot see how programming itself can be challenging in any way. It's not trivial per se or quickly over, but I fail to see how it can be anything but mechanical in and of itself. This feels like "writing" as in grammar and typing is the hard part of writing a book.
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one example i come back to is multithreaded layouting/rendering browser engines. it was mentioned in the servo blog post back then when mozilla worked on it: "we tried it in c++ but it was simply too hard and complicated" (the argument was that they were able to do it in rust). still, as long as rust wasn't avaiable, the problem was considered "too hard" for the team that wrote firefox. in my opinion that's a solid argument for "programming problem that was too hard".
but as simon said, i too consider coming up with "the algorithms, the strategy" as part of programming. saying "it's easy to do if you know exactly how to do it" is somewhat tautological.
I am spending about 10h per day solving chemical engineering problems (dynamic simulation, model predictive control, etc.). The programming is hard on top of hard science. Even after 25 years of experience, it is still hard to find the right abstraction to implement everything.
Still, one thing I really like with LLM/AI, is that now, I can allow myself to test different abstractions a bit faster. I can allow myself to "try" more complex refactoring on a feature branch, because if I describe correctly the abstraction I want, the LLM/AI tool will be normally good at producing it. But to describe my abstraction, I need to pull all my programming and engineering years of experience.
But at the end of the day, I always tell my wife, that with these new tools, which I could not imagine so powerful 3 years ago, I live in the future :-)
I count "figuring out how to do it" as part of the work of programming, personally.