alt Hacker NewsThe activity that needed and still needs to be protected is problem solving:
- Understanding the problem at hand
- Putting all the pieces together so that they solve the right problem the right way
- Making sure that the solution facilitate future extension and doesn't lead to a ball of mud two months from now... Unless stakeholders want it to be quick and dirty, then making sure they understand the costs/risks
- Planning execution a way that is incremental and testable so that we can build confidence that the system is doing what we expect of it
- if you are in a team, figuring out common dependencies so that those can be done first and unblock parallelism on execution.
Once all that is done and documented, writing the code was easy and fast.
What would sometimes happen is that some unexpected detail or dependency would be discovered as part of the writing of the code and then you are back at the beginning, figuring out how to make everything fit together.
I find that the main confusion comes from people not realizing that those are two different activities and instead calling it all "writing code".
> Understanding the problem at hand
I think one of the things that AI is uncovering is how bad many programmers were/are at this. Sure , they may understand by ref vs. by val, but they can’t or won’t take the time to really understand what needs to be built.
I’ve said for a long time that coding is the easy part, it’s understanding what needs to be built that’s hard. AI has now come along and born that out.