> The code was never the hard part.

Yes for the people who never coded, that was not the hardest part. We always had more ideamen than programmers, they could never execute anything. If code was never the hard part, vibecoding wouldn't be so popular.

Choosing the right problem to solve was always very important. The code wasn’t always the hard part, but arguably it really was the hard part more often earlier on.

For example, a personal computer operating system that runs all your existing programs at full speed but doesn’t crash all the time and the ability to run a virtual machine on an x86 PC both took as long as they did to get to market primarily due to the technical difficulty, not because it was hard to find people ready to pay for them. Those kinds of hard coding problems are less plentiful, or at least less obvious today.

  The code was never the hard part.

I remember there was a debate in my company on execution vs idea. Execution being writing code, the process that comes with it, and the idea being the understanding, market fit. Both sides had good arguments.

Hiring a software team to build an idea was extremely expensive and risky before ChatGPT. That's why most businesses in the world did not have a software engineering team.

I see this phrase thrown around alot and it lacks any substantive evidence. If coding was the easy part why were junior level SWEs getting paid six-figure salaries?

People who say coding wasn't the hard part have never had to refactor a legacy system without LLM assistance and it shows.

Yeah it was ... it just wasn't the ONLY hard part.

Large companies are working hard on laying off and buying out real persons for GPU compute budget.

Distribution is the moat now :)