These comments reveal a stark reality: most HN commenters have never worked on a really hard problem. They think hard problems are leetcode hards that have a prescribed list of known techniques to apply.

They think communication, alignment, gathering requirements, and other political bullshit is the hard part because they have never actually solved or had to grapple with a truly hard problem.

That’s fine, but it shows the corporate programmer who is probably in meetings all day has a vastly different reality than those of us who have had to solve open problems with no solution written somewhere because there is none.

Most useful software engineering work is doing fairly simple things and the numbers of people doing this work reflects that.

> those of us who have had to solve open problems with no solution written somewhere because there is none.

Probably because solving said 'truly hard problem' is niche with little or limited value as few people have tried to solve it (otherwise a solutions will likely have been written).

Maybe the future has those as two different jobs re: hard problems.

- The sorcerer: Have meetings with others until you know just how valuable a solution to this hard problem actually is, characterize it well, pool resources use cases and documentation, and then work with whatever wizard (or university thereof) is known to be able to solve that kind of problem. Have them find a solution to the hard problem and publish it. Use that publication as context, and have your LLMs integrate the solution.

- The wizard: Find hard problems with adequate funding behind them. Solve them. Don't worry about stakeholders or integrations--the problems are hard enough on their own.

It used to be we found ourselves jumping back and forth between sorcerer and wizard. But there are so many hard problems with solutions that are now in the training data for these models. A relevant skill for the sorcerer, besides the skills that are relevant in those meetings, is not solving hard problems head on, but being a sort of remixer of existing solutions to hard problems.

I think this would actually be better, because more hard problems would get solved in the open where they can benefit everybody, rather than ending up as IP-shaped ammo for zero sum games.