Why is programming hard?

People have been predicting the rise of no-code for decades and it's never happened.

One reason that programming is hard is the arcane and unforgiving syntax.

If you mess up, the compiler will yell at you with cryptic errors.

Luckily, LLMs are very good at interpreting those cryptic errors and fixing the problem… even with no humans in the loop.

But programming is also hard because programming requires generalizing and generalizing is hard.

Generalizing requires finding disconfirming evidence proactively and changing a thing to be resilient to it.

Constantly figuring out how your thing will break and defending against it.

Proactively finding disconfirming evidence and incorporating it into your thing is terrifying and hard.