I think the statement "code was never the hard part" is true but it's relative.

Programming is not easy and it takes years to master. Some people became really good at solving complex programming puzzles and 'Code Jams' and focused on it. Unfortunately, the same aspect which made this skill highly visible and highly praised, is what made it easiest to automate.

All those medals, trophies and certificates... not the mention advantages at big tech software job interviews... Came at a cost.

Meanwhile there is a whole group of people who have been honing their skills in software design, architecture, distributed systems, security and other less visible, less rewarded skills who have been ignored by the markets. These people still can't be automated.

It's a large problem space so after a decade or two, the coding aspect feels small relative to all the theory and experience surrounding it.

I met many senior people who didn't take programming seriously as a skill, long before LLMs.

One time, when I was at university, one of my math lecturers was boasting about the superiority of math as a discipline and said to the class "Software engineers... There are no software engineers; they're programmers."

That statement was never true but it's much more obvious now. The fact that a lot of people shared this belief highlights the fact that these other skills were invisible.

There is probably as much engineering (if not more engineering) involved in delivering a complex, reliable software project as there is delivering a complex skyscraper project in civil engineering... It's the same kind of activity; lots of interdependent parts, each with their own constraints and requiring many decisions to be made with lots of tradeoffs. At least with a skyscraper, the customer requirements are relatively very stable.