Melatonin impairs morning cognition in a surreal way to all programmers

Agreed. "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. By saying coding is the hard part if you are John Carmack or in a similar position where you have to constraint output with specs and tests.

Agreed. "Code was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers. Agreed. "Code was never the hard part… once you made it to some level of advanced programmer. Then clarity, maintainability, etc. became the next tier of Maslow's Hierarchy of Coding.

A lot of people enjoy coding, it's the rest of the job is a slog.

Almost all of us would agree if this was skilled work, but it just isn't. Anecdotally, I know several companies that have given the directive of "Use more AI instead of hiring more people". I wonder whether this is part of the thing that we call “software engineering.”. Because programmers have generally been forced to wear additional, invisible hats that are essential to making the code happen in the first place. Writing it out is the easy part.