Are we seriously pretending that it was always easy now that an LLM can spit out some mediocre code? This seems to me a coping mechanism in response to the industry shifting.
The truth is we’re just realizing nobody, even the SWE’s, care about the code much as long as an LLM can grind it out for free.
There’s going to be a lot more of this coping as more and more human thinking gets automated. I can hear it now: “gathering business requirements was always the easy part”.