--- title: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all... description: A rebuttal to the popular claim that 'code was never the hard part' in software development. The author argues this framing dismisses the genuine skill, craft,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers-m4qtytysc twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers | daily.dev og:description: A rebuttal to the popular claim that 'code was never the hard part' in software development. The author argues this framing dismisses the genuine skill, craft,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers-m4qtytysc og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/m4qtYtYsc.png og:image:alt: "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A rebuttal to the popular claim that 'code was never the hard part' in software development. The author argues this framing dismisses the genuine skill, craft, and effort programming requires, pointing to high salaries, burnout, legendary programmers, and the existence of entire educational systems built around coding as evidence. The post also challenges the flip side — that 'figuring out what to build' is uniquely hard — by noting that product managers and business analysts aren't treated as rockstars either. Rather than picking sides, the author advocates for valuing both deep technical skill and customer understanding, while urging developers to adapt to AI-driven industry change without abandoning their judgment, responsibility, or craft. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 182 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-09-14). **TL;DR:** The community is deeply divided: many agree that coding itself is genuinely hard and the 'code was never the hard part' framing is dismissive, but a significant faction argues that the real difficulty lies in understanding requirements, system design, and correctness — not the act of typing code — and that this distinction matters more than ever with AI tools. **Sentiment:** 20% positive · 45% mixed · 35% skeptical **The case for** - Coding encompasses far more than typing syntax — correctness, maintainability over time, and architectural soundness are all genuinely difficult. - High programmer salaries reflect real scarcity of people who can do the full job, including navigating ambiguous requirements and building reliable systems. - LLMs help with boilerplate but still require skilled engineers to define what correct behavior looks like, review output, and handle novel or safety-critical problems. - The time dimension of software — keeping code correct as requirements and teams evolve — is a hard problem AI doesn't solve. **The pushback** - Many commenters argue that 'writing code' (as distinct from engineering) genuinely is the easy part, and that understanding what to build and why is the harder challenge. - Programmer salaries were partly inflated by VC-era demand and ZIRP, not purely by the intrinsic difficulty of coding. - A vocal minority contends that AI has already made most software development feel routine, reducing it to testing and prompt refinement. - The post conflates different layers of programming (CRUD apps vs. systems programming vs. safety-critical code), making its argument less precise. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): A lively, multi-threaded debate with no consensus — some defend coding as genuinely hard, others insist the difficulty was always in requirements and correctness rather than syntax, and a few argue AI has already commoditized most of the work. - lobsters (mixed): No comments were present, so no community signal is available beyond the submission itself. **Hottest debate:** Whether 'writing code' and 'writing correct code' are meaningfully separable — and therefore whether the 'code was never the hard part' claim is insightful or a semantic sleight of hand. **Open questions** - Will AI tools actually free engineers to tackle harder technical problems, or will business incentives just use them to cut headcount? - How much of the historically high programmer salary was due to genuine skill scarcity versus VC-era demand inflation? - At what point does AI-assisted development produce enough low-quality code debt that the maintenance burden outweighs the productivity gains? - Is there a meaningful distinction between 'coding' and 'programming,' and does that distinction hold across all domains (CRUD apps vs. systems vs. safety-critical)? **Highlights** > 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. > — [tikhonj on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224528) > The answer to all these "if coding is easy" questions is that coding isn't programming (to put it in Lamport's terms). Encoding your ideas into a programming language is easy. Understanding that your ideas are bad is hard. You have clients with multiple devices connecting to your backend simultaneously, while you mediate their interactions with your partner systems. Their versions might not be up to date. It's a distributed system. When was the last time you cracked open a distributed systems textbook? When was the last time you built a system and stared reality right in face, that is: - can't trust your clocks - pick 2/3 of CAP - exactly-once delivery impossible - the code will need to be altered and released without downtime - hackers will try to exploit you for fun and profit - your manager doesn't want you wasting time getting the above right Coding is the easy bit. > — [mrkeen on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224116) > I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code. > — [bluejay2387 on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224264) > Exactly. Writing code is easy. Junior developers do it all the time. Hell, they write far mode code and do it faster! I go half the speed of a junior developer, but the code I write lasts five years to a decade with an order of magnitude or two fewer bugs and long-term maintenance burden. > — [stouset on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49224676) > nope, I've definitely worked on a lot of projects where knowing how to satisfy the requirements was not the challenge, writing the code was genuinely hard. complex data structures that had to have invariants maintained, distributed access to shared memory, dealing with various forms of fault tolerance, and above all getting some complex algorithms to run at an acceptable speed - all that really does get bottlenecked on the difficulty of the specific low level code you have to write. and then there are the architectural issues that make all the difference not when the code is first written but months later when you want to add another big feature and find out that fitting it into the existing code base is hampered by the early decisions you made. I'm honestly glad to have LLMs to help with a lot of that, though I'm also glad that I built up the skills to do them myself over the last few decades and am a little sad that programmers today will not build a lot of those skills up. > — [zem on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225266) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/iixlsm/code_was_never_hard_part_is_insult_all) · 1 points · 1 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222189) · 209 points · 181 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Code was the smallest part of the job](https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-the-smallest-part-of-the-job-jodmlbnfz) · Tech World With Milan · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [They lied to you. Building software is really hard.](https://daily.dev/posts/they-lied-to-you-building-software-is-really-hard--q4q4xgabf) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers-m4qtytysc) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"\"Code was never the hard part\" is an insult to all programmers","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers-m4qtytysc","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers-m4qtytysc"},"datePublished":"2026-08-08T18:20:05.634Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T08:48:34.829Z","description":"A rebuttal to the popular claim that 'code was never the hard part' in software development. 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