I think just as hard, I type less. I specify precisely and I review.
If anything, all we've changed is working at a higher level. The product is the same.
But these people just keep mixing things up like "wow I got a ferrari now, watch it fly off the road!"
Yeah so you got a tools upgrade; it's faster, it's more powerful. Keep it on the road or give up driving!
We went from auto completing keywords, to auto completing symbols, to auto completing statements, to auto completing paragraphs, to auto completing entire features.
Because it happened so fast, people feel the need to rename programming every week. We either vibe coders now, or agentic coders or ... or just programmers hey. You know why? I write in C, I get machine code, I didn't write the machine code! It was all an abstraction!
Oh but it's not the same you say, it changes every time you ask. Yes, for now, it's still wonky and janky in places. It's just a stepping stone.
Just chill, it's programming. The tools just got even better.
You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.
We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.
We miss thinking "hard" about the small details. Maybe "hard" isn't the right adjective, but we all know the process of coding isn't just typing stuff while the mind wanders. We keep thinking about the code we're typing and the interactions between the new code and the existing stuff, and keep thinking about potential bugs and issues. (This may or may not be "hard".)
And this kind of thinking is totally different from what Linus Torvalds has to think about when reviewing a huge patch from a fellow maintainer. Linus' work is probably "harder", but it's a different kind of thinking.
You're totally right it's just tools improving. When compilers improved most people were happy, but some people who loved hand crafting asm kept doing it as a hobby. But in 99+% cases hand crafting asm is a detriment to the project even if it's fun, so if you love writing asm yourself you're either out of work, or you grudgingly accept that you might have to write Java to get paid. I think there's a place for lamenting this kind of situation.
And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.