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Yet again hearing how some skilled work never truly mattered now that it's getting automated, while it absolutely did and was a point of professional pride for many. It's a significant aspect of 'deskilling', which is a known consequence of automation. Pretending otherwise is needlessly unkind.

I've been guilty of saying "coding was never the hard part", and thanks for calling out this harm. For me it's been an imprecise attempt to *distinguish* the skilled part from the "manual labour". E.g. nobody thinks *typing* the code was the skilled part.

For me it's been a response to "AI makes code free", which is now an article of faith in mgmt but controversial for engineers. I think the disagreement is about the scope of "coding". Mgmt would like it to mean "producing software that solves business problems is now free", but that isn't true.