Code Was Always the Easy Part

There is a piece doing the rounds on DEV.to — AI Writes the Code Now. So What Are You? — and it is thoughtful, well-written, and almost right. I am a sysadmin. I have always looked askew at programmers. From where I sit: if they are not producing bugs, they are busy creating security holes. That is unfair, of course. But only slightly. The author is worried that AI is replacing programmers. He's not wrong about the symptoms. He's wrong about the diagnosis. AI isn't threatening programmers because programmers suddenly became redundant. AI is exposing something that was always true and that the industry spent decades pretending wasn't. To say it plainly: most code is not the hard part of software. Most of it never was. This needs some unpacking, because "code" covers a lot of ground. Three Things We've Been Calling the Same Thing There is a distinction that working developers know intuitively but rarely say out loud. Code is notation. It is the translation layer between intent and machin