[delayed]

Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part, so if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy, otherwise it can seem like the hard part.

> "Coding isn't the hard part, it's the challenging part"

So what you're saying that it's a challenging part but not the hardest part? If so, that sounds fair as a take to me. But I don't get your point about "if you enjoy the challenge then it's easy". And It feels to me it's the opposite. You'd only start enjoying it once you've spend a lot of time practicing and honing your skills. (and I don't think it's that fun, it's like... 5% of the time fun? i.e. when you suddenly understand a bug or something or when all of tests pass in TDD)

It’s like being a mechanic. You either “like” fixing things and making it go or it’s all just a greasy mess that pays your bills.

I can picture in my mind the image of a mechanic that likes and enjoys fixing things. But I do wonder how much of it is real joy. At the end of the day what drives most people is that they want to satisfytheir human needs. bring food to the table. That's life for most people on Earth, then can find meaning elsewhere. And even those who are "passionate", as I said, I do wonder how much of it is pure fun. I asked doctors and engineers about this before, many of them don't feel the constant passion that I see in the picture I imagined. What drives most people isn't passion. It's responsiblities and satisfying human needs. And can probably become a great software engineer without falling in love with programming. I'm probably over-analysing what you said though, I do get what you say.

Life is an ouroboros friend. Or a perpetual wheel if you prefer.

There is no constants but that everything comes to an end and everything else moves on.

I still doodle in design and code. Even when there’s no further point!

I have an unfinished JavaScript version of Kriegspiel I’ve been working on for twenty years. Maybe some day I’ll finish it!

I'm not sure this sentence actually means it's technically easy. Obviously it depends on the program, making a simple web page is not the same as building an MMORPG. But other aspects of development can be often overlooked by programmers, like software design. Or like marketing, selling the project you did.

Programming was never the hard part for experienced programmers. And now that AI "solved" it, these programmers still face the same challenges they faced before.

There's a difference between coding and programming. Coding itself is not hard — like when you use some framework to build another form on an e-commerce site. But programming itself is harder, since it means you need good knowledge in some area to be really good. Even in the era of agents, real programming is still needed, because AI knows a lot, but asking the right questions or thinking about architecture is still your job.