alt Hacker News“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
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Exactly! Try reading a large C code base.
Insult it one thing, it’s also not true in the slightest which is the bigger issue.
> talking to users ... good code ... we should aim for both
tl;dr nothing has changed.
> If coding is easy, why doesn't everyone just build ten variations of a thing and see which pans out?
Because it is hard. :). Writing good code - takes years of practice.
>If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time?
Yes, it's fairly axiomic that he was "just at the right place at the right time" because there are dozens of modern "boomer shooters" on steam that are not nearly as successful as DOOM or Quake. You might counterargue that its always harder to do something thats never been done before but that would only be a tacit admission that coding actually was the easy part in that case.
Good article if you read it all.
> Those decades spent fighting memory bugs in C or C++, with the scars to prove it, are worthless in the age of Rust, Go, Python and JavaScript.
For most people sure. I’ve had GC kill a service in production, or even just tank p99. And I think a decade of C gives you a massive head start with rust. Less screaming “WTF WHY?” at the compiler anyway.
Since not everyone seems to be familiar with human communication:
The phrase "X is the hard part" means that X is the hardest part, not that all the other parts are easy.
Maybe the author has a skill issue, as they conflated "software engineering" with "coding".
It is all the parts of maintaining the software with time and engineering with all the moving parts (not the coding) is the point of why software engineering exists.
It's more accurate to say "code was only the worst bottleneck in a multi-bottleneck system". The second-worst bottleneck has been promoted to first. And it might be only marginally better.
Code generation was never the hard part. Knowing wtf you’re supposed to actually write was always much harder and this hasn’t changed. It’s not hard to write a loop or an if-statement. It’s hard to actually solve a problem with them at production scale. Carmack’s Fast Inverse Squareroot is not hard to write - it’s hard to figure out how to even do one in the first place. Writing it out is the easy part.
Claude writes 90% of my code but the bottlenecks always were and still are:
* getting clear requirements from product
* getting the damn code reviewed so I can merge it
Neither of these are fixed. Frankly, overuse of AI has made both of these worse. Claude brained product owners going hog wild with Claude Design are a nightmare to deal with, and the volume of absolute trash quality code being submitted for review is soul crushing.
No, using AI to automate code reviews is not acceptable. Code Review isn’t about a systematic checklist (though they can help) it’s about making sure people understand the actual changes being made to the system because it’s people who are accountable for what happens in production. LLMs can be part of the process of reviewing code but they suffer from the same issues as any other chatbot based tools (hallucinations, context confusion or not enough context, getting bogged down in impossible code paths or other minutia, etc…) so you have to review that review carefully too. Human judgment is still king.
These days my job is primarily reviewing offshore slop and making sure it’s in a good enough state to merge. I’m doing merge and release management way more than actually coding (and it sucks btw because I actually enjoy coding with or without agents). If the quality of the code turned in for me to review and merge is any indication, engineers/system architects are going to have their hands full.
Then let the code monkeys be insulted then.
Good riddance to the overpaid coders.
And hello cheap replacements!
The bottom line has improved. And that's good for business. Which was the only thing that mattered. Regardless of any reactionary sentimentalism.
The author's primary misunderstanding in my opinion is that time consuming is being conflated with hard.
>If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
There is more to those roles than just coding. In fact the more expensive "programmers" often do not code themselves.
>Why was there so much stress, overwork and burnout even before AI started churning out 5000-line PRs?
Something being time consuming is different from something being hard. There are simple factory jobs that also demand overworking.
>Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it's so easy?
Building software takes time and since velocity is important companies wanted people who could increase velocity.
>If coding is easy, why do we have doorstoppers like Clean Code and The Pragmatic Programmer? Is The Art of Computer Programming a light summer read? Is SICP a coffee-table book? Why do we have bootcamps or even whole college degrees dedicated to it?
So authors can make money? Programming is learned by a ton of kids on their own there is no need for boot camps or college degrees just for the benefit of being able to program.
If coding is easy, was Carmack just at the right place at the right time? Why do we consider Fabrice Bellard a genius?
The earlier you are to a field the easier it is to have your impact recorded. In markets with first movie advantage being earlier also helps a lot. A lot of people were able to program so what made them earlier than others was not just being able to program.
>If coding is easy, why are people angry at AI (or anyone else) copying their code? Why do they act like they've poured their sweat, soul, and copious amounts of time into something so trivial?
Again something being time consuming doesn't mean it was hard.
>If coding is easy, why do many now feel like their identity and professional purpose are being stripped away from them?
When you spend a big percentage of your life doing something it becomes part of your identity regardless of difficulty.
>If coding is easy, why is software so damn buggy?
Because making bug free software takes a lot of time and resources. Those resources have a higher return on investment elsewhere.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless? Why aren't there rigorous 10-step interviews for them? Why aren't they getting paid more than the developers?
People are clueless because it is hard. Pay is not based off of difficulty.
>If deciding what to build is the hard part, why aren't market researchers, usability experts and—hell, customer success—considered rockstars in a software company? If “understanding the customer” is harder, why are business analysts looked down on as pencil pushers?
Because the company finds it cheaper to outsource? A ton of companies have their employees setting up and using telemetry to understand their customers so it's not a one dimensional thing.
>If implementation is easy and finding demand is harder, why are programmers upset when the salespeople promise a new feature to a customer to close the sale? They've found a genuine demand, something people will pay for!
Programming takes time and resources. These may have a higher return on investment elsewhere than this niche feature. It may make maintaining the entire product take more resources to support a niche feature.
>If coding is easy, why doesn't everyone just build ten variations of a thing and see which pans out?
Again building entire products takes a lot of resources. And 10x the cost of building every product is not going to be competitive in the market.
Code really is the easiest part. That doesn't mean code is easy. It means everything is hard, and code is just the least hard part. The best programmer in the world will still create bugs. Therefore you need something else to account for and deal with the eventual bugs.
In the rest of the engineering world, the way you do that is by standards bodies developing reliable, tested, certified methods to build things that avoid common problems. Pipes that are certified to a certain PSI or UV exposure. Wires certified to a certain amount of amperage, wetness, heat. Nails certified with a certain metal grade, tolerances.
Those standard parts are then used in a certified building method for a specific application at specific usage criteria. 3x 12d nails in one kind of wood joint. Beams spaced 24" apart, with 3/4" CDX plywood spread load. You don't guess or follow trends. You don't do what you think is "clean" or "beautiful". You solely follow the engineering standards and code. Now you don't have to think much, and your results are highly reliable. The job becomes easy.
Software doesn't have professional engineering and building standards like that. So humans literally just make this shit up as they go, making software however the zeitgeist of HN says "feels good". This results in unpredictable, unreliable software products that are hard to build because nobody agrees on the "right way".
Somebody read a blog post, or a slogan or quip on a Wikipedia page, and decided on their own interpretation of how that generic advice would drive their work. Software engineers only talk to other software engineers, so they don't realize how incredibly unscientific, inefficient, unreliable, and difficult their work is. Trying to make something predictable and reliable is therefore very hard. Not because writing the code is hard, but because the entire software product lifecycle is basically vibes. The uncertainty, variability, and lack of reproducible standard parts makes figuring out how to build something become way more complicated than it should be.
The actual lines of code are easy to read and write. But without the standards common to every other engineering discipline, the rest of the job is a slog.
> If deciding what to build is the hard part, why do so many product managers seem clueless?
The divide between product managers and developers mimics the artificial divide between humanities and STEM.
You divide workers into competing groups, then make they outperform each other.
In reality, practically all humans can both become excellent coders and acquire deep product skills as well. We can also learn a wide variety of other skills in a single lifetime. The only blockers on that are social and psychological, you're meant to not believe that is possible.
All this talk about code in this adversarial role with product comes from that, and all of it dissolves under almost any valid critical angle. The engagement with this kind of discussion takes place exclusively in that aforementioned social layer.
TL;DR weak bait
The software development profession is in the midst of upheaval. Nobody knows how the AI revolution will play out in the end, but it is clear many aspects of work and life will be transformed—including programming.
I'm still not seeing it.
I'm seeing a lot of loud people, a lot of LOC produced, and a lot of people angrily pointing to their sideprojects... but no massive impact outside our bubble. Remember it's 2026, we are 5 years into this hype, the models are better than ever, and all the software we used around us is basically in the state it would have been in had we projected 2021 tech 5 years into the future ("in 2026, there will be... another backend JS runtime!")
I'm afraid all the personal anecdotes of technologists have not translated to real world results... other than negative ones like GitHub now having 0 9s of reliability.
Of course I suppose I'm "coping", as if I wouldn't be over the moon if AI had made me 10x productive... but maybe, just maybe, a lot of people really like talking to chatbots?
Don't get your panties in a twist over marketing slop selling AI to companies
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A pretty weak essay.
The arguments are couched in questions… which all either have ready answers or imply strawman arguments that few are making.
I suspect it’s emotional and indirect because the author understands how poor its arguments are. That leaves open the question of why do the blog post at all, but I guess bloggers have to blog, whether or not they’ve got anything to say. An angry, emotional, vague post probably gets a nice amount of views.
Making software is no longer very hard. It's becoming a few steps up from burger flipping. Maybe somewhere around line chef.
There's still some skill involved, but the skill is mostly in manual testing, and accurately phrasing what went wrong. The AI is better at debugging than people are, and the code isn't great, but perfectly adequate for pretty much everything. And it's even fine at system design these days.
It's interesting realizing how mind numbingly thoughtless my job has become.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind it if this was skilled work, but it just isn't.
I've always taken it to mean "coding is the easiest part of a developer's job"
That doesn't make it inherently easy, but it is the easiest part to automate.
A modern LLM is perfectly capable of maintaining decent code quality and architecture (provided you ask for it) up to a few thousand lines of code, but after that it very quickly loses the plot if you're not designing your documentation right and keeping a hand on the architectural tiller.
Architecture is about staving off chaos for as long as possible given the maximum functionality you expect it to achieve. That's hard enough for a human, with a deep understanding of your business, to do. Architectures that endure is a hard problem, dwarfing the difficulty of writing the actual code. Choosing what product to build is also a hard problem if you expect to meet any success. What it does, what it specifically doesn't do. Sounds easy on paper, and if all you're doing is Sunday prototypes it feels almost trivial. But once you're doing a real product with real consumers, it's a very different thing.
Great article. Nice pragmatic and cool-head take on what is going on. Thank you for posting this.
Side note: I so forgot about the "Don't make me think" book! Thanks for reminding this exists. I submit this should be part of "Software Development 101", right there alongside SICP.