You can build an insult to parse it

This is the best model to come out since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Get with the times, artisanal handwritten code is worthless. This is dishonest. Nobody said "coding is easy" in a void. They said "code isn't the hard part" means that X is the hardest part, not that all the other parts are easy. We usually see this kind of discussion takes place exclusively in that aforementioned social layer. TL;DR weak bait.

There's probably a lot wrong with the "coding was never the hard part”. None of these phrases survive context loss and still retain efficacy at general receivers. This is a bit of a tangent here - some discussion there seems to be to make everyone equally stupid. This idea has been explored in fiction, e.g. Harrison Bergeron. This has been happening for a while before the LLMs coming around. A lot of people enjoy coding, it's the rest of the job is a slog.

Unpopular opinion: I fully believe that anyone who says "code was never the hard part" means that X is the hardest part, not that all the other parts are easy.