It’s not that coding is easy, it’s more that coding was not the bottleneck in the process at large organizations. It was (and still is) getting agreement on what to build, meeting with stakeholders, and dealing with the ever-changing priorities.

A lot of people enjoy coding, it’s the rest of the job they don’t like. That’s why it feels hard.

If a tool was going to come along and automate away a huge part of a programmer’s job, I think most would want that tool to eliminate the meetings, ambiguity, scope creep, and administrative work… not the coding itself.

My best days at work were days with nothing on my calendar, when I could just put on some headphones and make something. At the end of the day I felt like I accomplished something and had something I could see and use to show for it; I finished the day happy and energized. Contrast that with a day full of meetings, fire drills, and busy work, where at the end of the day I’m mentally and emotionally drained, wondering if I should quit to stock shelves at the local grocery store. Which day sounds “harder”?

I don’t know about where everyone else works, but defining the details of what to build seems so hard that no one actually does it, so it falls on us as we build things. During one project I got a directive from the CIO (which has only happened 1 time in 20 years) to get what I was working on done in 4 weeks. I made all the decisions myself when it came to the details and had something mostly working in 2 weeks (I skipped all meetings and any other distractions during this time). Several months later, the bureaucracy came into play. The principal architect on the project, who I never talked to before the CIO told me to get it done, finished his design and some details needed to be worked out. One such detail was a port list. It took 4+ months of meetings to get that done, and it still required constant tweaking after that for another year. There was a half dozen other things like that in the same project. So yeah, the initial code was pretty quick and fun to write, and then it was followed by 2-3 years of hell, that probably should have been worked out before we started coding. I ended up having to go back and re-write a bunch of stuff to align with the design that was decided on over a year after the deadline the CIO gave me. In most cases, I think the updated code is worse, as the bureaucratic design creates a lot of operational work that my original design avoided entirely, but I digress.