Coding, as a skill, used to be truly amazing.
I should be more clear.
Code is still pretty impressive. It's neat that we can control computers well enough to do amazing things and people today are doing more with code than ever before. But there was a time (let's say roughly the 2010s, plus or minus a few years) where it was both approachable, but came with enough friction that it was highly valued.
I know lots of people who came from non-technical backgrounds who learned enough Javascript (or Ruby or Python or whatever) by working hard for a relatively short amount of time and then eventually landed high paying software engineering jobs. I helped run an in-house bootcamp at an old job that helped people learn coding skills and many of those people are senior engineers today. This is amazing.
During that time coding was in a sweet spot where there was enough maturity and tooling that coding was made both more accessible and more powerful, much more so than when I was studying CS in college. I don't remember very many people who weren't already "computer people" teaching themselves how to code in the early 2000s.
Couple this with an explosion of educational resources, "learn to code" videos and tutorials, and bootcamps and there really was a path to learning these skills. And you could keep getting more skilled by learning about languages and design patterns and new technologies and algorithms and lots of other things that were non-trivial but approachable. What was incredible was that there was still high demand. The job market wasn't yet saturated, ZIRP still had tech companies hiring engineers like crazy, but coding was still esoteric enough that not EVERYBODY wanted to do it.
Writing code used to be just hard enough AND just easy enough to be viable and valuable.
Like every other piece of tech writing on the internet now, this one is kind of about AI.
It's mind boggling that anybody can making complex applications through natural language prompting. People currently working in software are living in a sci fi fantasy world. But powerful tools like this have made coding cheap, which is amazing in many ways, but it's ok to take a little time to morn that when things become cheap, they become less valued.
While I'm enjoying all the productivity that AI has unlocked (I'm certainly tackling projects I wouldn't have previously approached) there's still a twinge of sadness because of the loss of coding as something that was just hard enough to be amazing.