I think the "difficulty" of software engineering is essentially constant no matter what abstraction level you move to, because human cognition adapts to new tools until it can fully utilize itself.

Tools are only affordances, not a magic wand that makes work disappear.

Great software engineering was immensely challenging before. It is still immensely challenging now, despite very different workflows.

@simonw
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge