Senko Rašić takes aim at the airy dismissal that “LLMs may be good at coding, but software was never the hard part” — and methodically dismantles it. If coding is easy, he asks, why were programmers in high demand, well-paid, and burned out long before AI arrived? Why do canonical texts like SICP, TAOCP, and Clean Code exist? Why is software still so buggy? And conversely, if “figuring out what to build” is the truly hard work, why aren’t product managers and customer researchers paid more than engineers, interviewed more rigorously, and treated as rockstars? His real target isn’t AI itself but the framing that reduces a deeply skilled craft to a commodity execution step. Rašić acknowledges the tectonic change AI brings — and explicitly rejects both the “become a manager of AI agents” hype and the “AI code is stolen slop” resistance — arguing instead that we need to hold onto both technical depth and human judgment. The essay dovetails beautifully with Niklas Gruhn’s “Don’t be a meat proxy”: don’t outsource your understanding, taste, or responsibility to the machine, even as the tools around you shift.
"Code Was Never the Hard Part" Is an Insult to All Programmers — Senko Rašić
A sharp defense of programming as genuine craft in an AI era — pushing back against the dismissive "code was never the hard part" trope that treats implementation as trivial.