Coding is harder, right?

You know this by now: AI will not build you anything useful if you don't know what you want.

It's cool, it's amazing, it's the next jump. How many instances are out there of LLMs messing up production, deleting crucial configurations, or plain misunderstanding the task.

People keep typing and the jobs keep changing. The roles are evolving into something else. This is true for tech writers as much as programmers.

Funny thing though—I keep going back to the root misunderstanding of both of those. The "high-level" people made an inference at some point of what both of these jobs were and never questioned the definition again.

It's always been understood that coding is hard. Computers were this new nerdy thing, required years of training, and were also about to replace us all. To become a programmer you had to go to school for years, and be a math-head. And be a nerd, wear glasses, love video games, play Dungeons and Dragons, and all that jazz.

But learning how to do it was genuinely demanding. The languages were ever-evolving. They still are. You could only learn it at schools of higher education and not from code camps or YouTube. YouTube did not even exist at the time.

Today with internet, it is pretty evident what the democratization of knowledge means. You can access everything. You find your thing and go learn it. Get good, get paid. Happy even?!

Did the initial unavailability of programming training lead to this preconceived notion that coding was harder than other professions?

Wasn't it like that for other professions, for example video editing? Writing—certainly.

Writing's been present for centuries. It's also been heralded as the hallmark of civilization. To this day it survives in the definition of what separates history from pre-history. What was before we could write it down for posterity.

At one point it's been equated to magic, and the wielders of these obscure arts were elevated to positions of power in religions, organizations, courts.

Nowadays, everyone learns letters at schools. Everybody writes something during their day: a grocery shopping list, a note, a ticket, a post, maybe even a poem.

But can they write though? Competently?

This assumption is at the core of the job market problem and perception of writing altogether. Granted, there are people who know. But as social media keeps reminding us - there are millions with no floodgates when it comes to posting confidently about anything online.

This is why the core writing skills matter more than the tools.

More than ever, we need content strategy for all our consumers: humans and robots alike. We must adapt our approach to the consumer of data. The way to accomplish this is to build it upon the core tenets of communicology not on the capabilities of a tool. Irrespective of what that tool happens to be at the time.

Calendar tools are amazing too - if you have things going on and know what you want to do.