> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.

The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part.

If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved from dev to BA.

> Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load.

I've found that the act of physically writing refines my understanding a lot more than simply reading.

We don't typically expect a person to read a trigonometry textbook and then perform well on an exam. They have to drill problems to surface their misunderstandings to themselves.

My fear is that, with developers adopting your approach, they're "designing" systems in much the same way that a read-the-book-only trigonometry student solves trigonometry problems.

Perhaps solution was the wrong word for me to use here. It was intended to encompass the implementation details (abstractions, architecture, observability, etc)… All the decisions the engineers would normally make during planning and execution. Once I have that nailed down, the act of writing the code is largely mechanical.

That’s the source of my “easy” framing. It has always had the lower cognitive load in my experience. Now that I can offload the mechanical part to AI, I spend more time on the hard parts.

I still read plenty of code along the way, maybe less of it now because it’s easier to surface which parts of the code I need to read.

thank you for putting into words that which has been hard for me to describe — I’ve noticed the worse a dev was at their job the more high their opinions of AI seem to be. The subject textbook analogy (trig book in your ex.) is a perfect frame of reference for why that might be the case…

to further that example, many people with the help of AI are ostensibly copy pasting trig problems from the book without understanding the mechanics running through them and labouring under the impressions they’ve become closer to skilled mathematicians

GP's "design the right solution" is a role between "programmer" and "business analyst" that got merged with "programmer" to become "developer" decades ago. That's where the high salary came from. It's been reemerging as "architect" now that "developer" has been watered down to include "programmer".

There was a time back in the 1980s (and probably before) when "analyst" paid better than "programmer". The programmer wrote the code; the analyst figured out what the code was supposed to do to meet the business need.

In my view, "programmer" merged with "analyst" to become "software engineer".

Who hires “pure solution modelers”? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone like that.

It’s still lower level than a business analysis though so it’s not the same