I'm not sure if it's made engineering harder, but it's certainly changing what it means to be a good engineer. It's no longer just about writing code. Now it's increasingly about having good taste, making the right decisions, and sometimes just being blessed with the Midas touch.
In any case, I think we should start treating the majority of code as a commodity that will be thrown away sooner or later.
I wrote something about this here: https://chatbotkit.com/reflections/most-code-deserves-to-die - it was inspired by another conversation on HN.
> It's no longer just about writing code
It never was
But that was a large part of it. When it was difficult to write correct, well-structured code, that was a major determinant in who would get a job as a developer - ability to design and test came second. Now that generating code is automatic, it's the rest that becomes important. That works well for those of us who could do all of those things, but hurts those whose only ability was to generate code.
Maybe 30-40 years ago. For as long as I've been around the basic ability to write good code was secondary to a long list of other skills.
That's different than saying a lot of people *believed* writing code was the hardest/most important part.
And now even more so.