Coding was never the hard part | Ulveon's Thoughts
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About Ulveon
Ulveon is a Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys thinking and discussing politics, philosophy, economics, and learning more about the world and himself.
Post's tagsAI (3)<br>Rant (5)<br>Response (1)<br>View all tags
Post's categoriesSoftware Engineering (1)<br>View all categories
I’ve read my fair share of passionate rejections of AI-assisted coding from my fellow software engineers. And I get it! LLMs deserve a ton of criticism for many reasons!<br>But, at times, I feel like we live in completely different worlds.<br>In this post, I would like to respond to Senko Rašić’s post titled “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers [archived version], which has a pretty catchy title, I must admit, and it provoked an intense emotional reaction when I first read the title alone.<br>Normally, when I write posts, I leave them to “simmer” for weeks or months, as I go through them multiple times, fixing issues, removing unnecessary content, or adding details I come up with over time, as I think about a topic deeply. In this post, I want to try a different approach. I will, of course, still pay attention to detail, but since this is much more of an opinion and perspective post than a factual post, it requires less research. Let me know if you like this format, or if you have any comments about either of my approaches to my posts!<br>Before I respond to the contents of the post, I want to make one thing clear: I do not, at all, agree with the title of Senko’s post. I think the claim that “coding was never the hard part” is not only a love letter to software engineering but also an acknowledgment that software engineering encompasses far more than code. There’s architecture, engineering, customer research, UX, UI, ergonomics, and most importantly, people . Software engineering is all about solving real problems for real people (well, sometimes for other animals too!). Behind every line of code there’s a restaurant order, a traveller, a tax return, a street light, an Amazon delivery, a GPS route, a song. In the tech industry, we solve technical problems. And sometimes, we solve them with code, yes, of course. The important thing about code is not how it looks or behaves; it is the problems it solves.<br>I am disappointed that in 2026, we still haven’t managed to agree on the fact that whether something compiles and runs is secondary to what problems it actually solves. I have the feeling some software engineers picked up programming perhaps thinking that code was a form of art and that they would be able to express themselves through Python, C, or Haskell?<br>And of course code can be art. It is not always art, but it has the potential to be art in the hands of artists such as Switch Angel, someone I have deep respect and admiration for:
Watch on YouTube<br>With that out of the way, let’s get started.<br>The actual response<br>If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
You are conflating coding and programming. I think we need to be precise with language. Coding is merely typing computer code on a keyboard. You can code HTML, XML, or JSON too! But those are not programming languages. Programming includes logic, system design, API contracts, and more. That is what you get paid for. You don’t get paid for typing computer code on a keyboard: you get paid to translate customer requests or Stories into computer code. Actually, I’d say you get paid to solve customer requests or Stories, and you happen to solve this via programming languages if you are a programmer. I prefer the term software engineer, so the distinction between coder and software engineer is clearer.<br>Why was there so much stress, overwork and burnout even before AI started churning out 5000-line PRs?
I mean, stress is everywhere in our lives. Ask any fast-food worker, Amazon delivery driver, DoorDash rider, aeroplane pilot, nurse, or lawyer if they feel stressed at work. I don’t think this is indicative of the difficulty of software engineering.<br>Why did companies seek 10x ninja rockstar coders and subject them to leetcode interviews—surely, a junior fresh out of college could churn out something if it’s so easy?
But they did seek juniors fresh out of college! There’s an entire industry built around the notion that instead of hiring one senior software engineer for 150k EUR, you can hire recent graduates in low Cost-of-Living countries, and get five to ten for the price of a single Western programmer. I will save my comments on the ethical aspects of this practice for another time. The fact is, those contractors are known to not produce particularly good or reliable code, but it was ideal for scale-ups when they needed to...