Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part" is really telling on themselves. Coding was never "hard" because most organizations were absolutely unwilling to take on any technical work that was hard. That tells us about business strategy and culture rather than anything about the fundamentals of programming or technical work.

The real conclusion is that programming is such a high-leverage activity that even technically trivial, low-quality programming is immensely valuable economically. That's not going anywhere, but maybe LLMs are going to make it all that much cheaper. (Which is mostly great! But I really don't look forward to the painful debugging and maintenance that reams of shit code will push down on programmers.)

But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.

In an ideal world, making mediocre code cheaper should leave more room for taking on harder technical challenges. In reality, this has always been dictated far more by non-technical factors—culture, leadership, trust, risk tolerance...—than by anything intrinsic to programming. But, at least for now, we can use the LLM hype to motivate the kind of deeper technical work that always made sense but was too uncertain or too open-ended or too long-term for non-technical leadership.

And we should also drop the bullshit "code was never the hard part" framing.

It's not really telling on oneself. Like you said, the easy stuff (e.g. basic business process automation i.e. constructing simple database queries) happens to be economically high ROI right now. Something like 3d graphics or signal processing or whatever are comparatively niche and less likely to pay as well. Most jobs that people will actually pay for are actually pretty mindless. Even for the more "advanced" jobs, it's likely the domain knowledge and not the programming per se that's difficult.

> But also, there still is a ton of programming that is fundamentally difficult. That's not going anywhere either. And LLMs are useful there too, but they're currently nowhere near replacing the expertise needed to do novel and non-trivial technical work.

Genuine question and not trying to be snarky here, I am actually curious: what fields or types of programming does this apply too? I think I've read anecdotes online about people in fields I previously (a few years ago lol) thought "oh yea an llm will never be able to help with that" and now see articles about how llm's are doing just that.

It is hardly any different from reviewing or debugging the code quality of most offshore deliveries.

Those corporations that undertake the actually difficult bits of programming end up charging so much money, to the point that people go out of to not use them though. Splunk, Oracle Database, Spanner, Datadog, VMware. We don't live in an idealized world divorced from business and money, unfortunately, but worse, software developers are notoriously cheap and hard to sell to. If I did the hard work and made a compiler that generate code that runs 10% faster, I should have a solid business. Even Intel couldn't make a business out of icc though. So the code is the hard part but business is also the hard part and it's a miracle any of this stuff ever gets off the ground.