I'm really getting tired of this "programming is hard" meme. It's not.
Maybe programming is not hard -- for you. Maybe software development is "as intuitive as it gets" -- for you. But that is an extreme generalization that's simply not fair.
Programming is not trivial and something that everyone should by definition be able to intuit. It requires a very specific and logical way of thinking. It requires intellect. It requires practice. I'd venture to guess that a vast majority of people out there couldn't "just figure it out".
Programming requires interest, practice, intellect and a very specific way of thinking. It can be taught, it can be learned, and it can even be mastered with enough effort (by some people). But let's not dismiss the hard work of the OP and of the many people out there trying to learn (or, frankly, failing to learn) by calling it intuitive and easy.
I will admit that many beginners find programming hard and counter-intuitive. This fact, however, is a reflection of the utter failure of our education system to teach a few important things:
Learning on your own. A K-12 curriculum is highly structured and guided, especially K-8. Consulting resources outside the curriculum and figuring things out for yourself is a valuable life skill that's seldom taught in a typical classroom.
Thinking rigorously. A typical curriculum involves memorizing facts, not figuring out the consequences of known facts. Knowing something well enough to make detailed, testable predictions simply isn't taught. (When I learned the scientific method in school, it was simply memorizing the list ["Formulate hypothesis", "Test hypothesis with experiment", "Write paper"]. Even intro college physics was basically applying known theory to measure numbers in the lab, more engineering than science.)
Tenacity. In school, when you learn your answer to a question is wrong, it happens at the end of the learning process, and it means you've failed at mastering that particular tiny corner of the curriculum, but need to move on anyway. However, in the real world -- particularly programming -- when you get a traceback or incorrect output, it's the beginning of a dialog between you, the language, and your mental model. Making a mistake doesn't reflect on your ability until you give up on fixing it. People simply don't realize how humbling programming is, in terms of the sheer number of mistakes that even the best programmers make. (Beginners don't use or can't yet understand tools like IDE's which instantly notify you of many errors -- especially syntax errors -- and incorrectly highlight many others, like missing quotes.)
Differential diagnosis. "What I expect isn't happening. Situations alpha, beta, or gamma might conceivably be happening based on my mental model of how things work. I already observe y, which eliminates situation alpha. Now z would be different between situation beta or gamma, so I just need to print z out and rerun...aha! Now that I know z, I can eliminate gamma, so the problem must be beta..." This sort of intense critical thinking is absolutely vital to functioning in technical subjects, and also enormously helpful in everyday life. But it's a skill that has to be trained, and our education system completely misses it.
Programming really doesn't come naturally to everybody.
Take a very basic task like "Apply this text replacement to all .txt files in this folder and all subfolders". If you are a beginner programmer for example in Python, you have to search for the module and get a basic understanding of how it works. While you never run into any conceptual difficulty, this can still take you a lot of time and you will make strange errors along the way.