The code was never the hard part. Understanding the market, developing product market fit, and evolving is the hard part.
Large companies aren't going to chase every opportunity.
Large companies aren't going to chase every opportunity.
For example, a personal computer operating system that runs all your existing programs at full speed but doesn’t crash all the time and the ability to run a virtual machine on an x86 PC both took as long as they did to get to market primarily due to the technical difficulty, not because it was hard to find people ready to pay for them. Those kinds of hard coding problems are less plentiful, or at least less obvious today.
People who say coding wasn't the hard part have never had to refactor a legacy system without LLM assistance and it shows.
The code was never the hard part.
I remember there was a debate in my company on execution vs idea. Execution being writing code, the process that comes with it, and the idea being the understanding, market fit. Both sides had good arguments.
Hiring a software team to build an idea was extremely expensive and risky before ChatGPT. That's why most businesses in the world did not have a software engineering team.
Yes for the people who never coded, that was not the hardest part. We always had more ideamen than programmers, they could never execute anything. If code was never the hard part, vibecoding wouldn't be so popular.
The tech is not there yet. It may not be ready for many years.
An LLM is just a really fancy nail gun to replace hammers. Much faster nailing, but you need to hold it right to not shoot yourself in the foot.