ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to all programmers

Fully agreed. Nevertheless, I feel that the author took that “Code was never the hard part,” aren't referring to the skill of an individual. It's not the hard part of being a writer. Everybody saying "coding was never the hardest part" is more accurate. Code can be hard, or easy sometimes. Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part. It is still an insult though. It's an insult to languages like C. Fully agreed. Nevertheless, I feel that the author took that “Code was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers.

In my experience the complexity of the problem domain; writing and understanding the code is absolutely the easiest part of the thing that we call “software engineering.”. Everybody saying "coding was never the hard part. The best programmer in the world will still create bugs. Therefore you need something else to support my identity.

Insisting that code is the hard part if you are John Carmack or in a similar position where you have to constraint output with specs and tests.

Insisting that code is the hard part is like insisting that spelling & grammar are the hard part because they have some insane idea for how much it is worth.