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by lelanthran 4 hours ago
> My personal experience: writing code has always been the easy part. AI does most of that now.

The only reason dev jobs paid more (by a factor of two or more) than pure solution modeling was because "writing code" was the hard part.

If you wanted to get paid just modeling the solution and handing it off to a coding team, those jobs were available for decades, typically called Business Analysts but few devs moved from dev to BA.

> Understanding the problem and the existing system well enough to design the right solution, even with AI assistance, is a higher cognitive load.

I've found that the act of physically writing refines my understanding a lot more than simply reading.

We don't typically expect a person to read a trigonometry textbook and then perform well on an exam. They have to drill problems to surface their misunderstandings to themselves.

My fear is that, with developers adopting your approach, they're "designing" systems in much the same way that a read-the-book-only trigonometry student solves trigonometry problems.