Coding is still hard in the AI shift
A useful correction to the AI-era story that coding was never the hard part: engineering craft and product understanding both still matter, and AI does not remove the need for judgment.
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Logged at IST: 2026-08-09 15:31 IST
What it is: Mario Zechner recommends Senko Rašić's essay, “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers.
Gist: Senko pushes back on the AI-era refrain that coding was always easy and that the real work was simply deciding what to build. His objection is not that product sense, user empathy, and stakeholder alignment are unimportant. It is that calling code easy erases the craft, judgment, and accumulated technical skill that make software reliable enough to maintain.
The essay also rejects the opposite cope, that code is pure human art that cannot be automated. The useful position is “both”: understand the system deeply and understand why it should exist. Seniors should learn more about UX, customer discovery, and business strategy, while juniors should still dig into fundamentals like memory, recursion, protocols, data structures, and algorithms.
The closing advice is the part worth saving for the AI tooling conversation: do not outsource understanding, judgment, empathy, or taste to AI. The work changes, but responsibility does not.
Newsletter angle: Good companion for AI-agent adoption notes. The durable work is not only orchestration or prompting, it is maintaining deep understanding of systems and users as the tools change.