I would add to what you said by saying that coding (that is, actually writing the code) may be easy enough and you can even get useful stuff made easily enough,

I would add to what you said by saying that coding (that is, actually writing the code) may be easy enough and you can even get useful stuff made easily enough, but as I said in the github copilot discussions, writing code is usually the least important aspect of my job as a programmer and only a small chunk of what I spend my time on. So, writing code might not be hard, but its also a kinda mechanical process. Most of the coding effort comes from translating your thoughts into what the language understands. Teenage me managed just fine, many kids start even younger. Writing code that does interesting things isn't, for many people and definitely shouldn't be for a professional programmer. However, as a programmer, I spend much more time on other tasks: figuring out what the requirements even are, refining them, figuring out what that even means in terms of code, figuring out the overall architecture, how it fits in with other systems or existing code, what data formats it uses, how it handles faults, persistence, scale, security. The data model (what data I have, what shape does it have, how can I transform it, where does it live/is it stored, who or what owns it, who or what is allowed to modify it/add to it/delete from it, what is its lifecycle, are there any legal requirements around storage or retention). How it interfaces with the outside world (UI or API). Besides the application code itself, I also spend a lot of my time on writing tests and on writing documentation. All of these tasks are, in my opinion, a lot harder and more time consuming than actually writing the code.