[SavageBeast]

In my experience and at this point in my career ark I can say that "coding" itself hasn't been the hardest part of the job in ... 20 years? Coding was never difficult. Understanding the rats nest of code that comprises a product is a big barrier. The whole "I know this looks batshit crazy but we do it this way for a business reason" and it goes on and on. Not to mention the database full of tables that are gigantic and nobody knows what they're for anymore (This company maybe your cell carrier I kid you not).

In all seriousness though, an AI at this point can do some cool things with some handholding, prompt refinement, etc such that its almost a Jr. Dev. Both more or less went to school for CS and both are minimally experienced but have a lot of code to look at and draw conclusions from. Neither know anything about the business domain. Both generate candidate solutions that will at best require some additional guidance.

Personally, I don't see things getting too far beyond this in the near term. Perhaps AI becomes a very good Jr Dev who can handle "write me a function with inputs Foo,Bar that returns the [biz logic] as Baz" and the "coders" modern job is to generate maybe 50% of the necessary code where the other 50% is the integration.

Who knows ... but I dont see people saying the things I think people would say if anyone was actually doing this for realsies.

[flembat]

Coding well is very difficult, that is one of the reasons why all of our software is still unreliable and ridden with bugs. I agree its not the hardest problem in product development.