Abstraction is beneficial and profitable up to a certain point, after which upkeep gets too hard or expensive, and knowledge dwindles into a competency crisis - for various reasons. I'm not saying we are at that point yet, but it feels like we're closing in on it (and not just in software development). 50 years ago isn't even 50 years ago anymore, if you catch my drift: In 1974, the real king of the hill was COBOL - a very straight-forward abstraction.

I'm seeing a lot of confusion and frustration from beginner programmers when it comes to abstraction, because a lot of abstractions in use today just incur other kinds of complexity. At a glance, React for example can seem deceptively easy, but in truth it requires understanding of a lot of advanced concepts. And sure, a little knowledge can go a long way in E.G. web development, but to really write robust, performant code you have to know a lot about the browser it runs in, not unlike how great programmers of yesteryear had entire 8-bit machines mapped out in their heads.

Considering this, I'm not convinced the LLM crutch will ever solidify into a pillar of understanding and maintainable competence.

And it really helps if you have a global view across the abstraction stack, even if you don't dive in the details of the implementation. I still think that having some computer organization/OS architecture knowledge would be great for developers, at least to know that memory is not free, even though we have GBs of it and that having an internet connection is not an integral part of the computer like the power supply.

LLMs aren't an abstraction, even a very leaky one, so the analogies with compilers and the like really fall flat for me.