The code was never the hard part.

It definitely was. It was at least 50% of 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.