Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies

Yes, writing code that (appears to) work was not the hard part. Even before LLMs you could find very cheap contractors on Upwork or through offshoring companies to write "code". Well-engineered code is hard. It still is. Code that is reliable, extensible, maintainable, scalable, legible, understandable is hard. Code where the specs and the "why" behind it were pressure-tested via thought and good intuition.