"Coding is the easy part of programming"

I think it has been 5 years or so since I made that sentence my LinkedIn profile's headline. It was a catchy phrase to look smart, and also a snarky way to convey a message:

that I acknowledge that a software project is not only an artefact, but rather, if not mostly, a socio-technical endeavour; that no software architecture makes sense without considering the educational background, stakes and psycology of the people working on it; that I am willing to embrace the multi-disciplinary effort needed to deliver value to the users and money to my employer; that I have no reticence in putting aside my speciality for the bigger purpose of a successful product.

As a DDD enthusiast and practitioner that sounds to me like the uttermost declaration that I'm a grown-up software engineer, and that I am so rooted into my discipline that I am ready to transcend it.

Fast-forward a few years, and the sentence no longer represented me. The olistic approach made me overlook my very One Job™. Treating code as mere detail had the unpleasant side effect of making me lose touch with the deep knowledge (and fun!) needed to master software engineering from its basics to the top. I fell into the olistic-engineering trap.

I had to backtrack, and I did it.

"Coding is the easy part of programming, again"

The sentence reached me back, in an unexpected way. Code has been commoditised by LLMs, and discussing code nowadays starts to sound like discussing tab/spaces after linters and formatters have become mainstream development tools: pointless.

The big challenge for me, now that I am forced to treat code as a detail, is to learn from my past and not give up on being a good software engineer.

Coding is the easy part of programming, this sentence is mine again, and with a totally different taste.