I don't really see this as analogous. Yes, you do choose an abstraction level to operate at, I rarely think in terms of transistors, or even gates (which by your logic an assembly programmer should do).

But I often do think across adjacent abstraction levels, because abstractions are (varying levels of) leaky. Modern compilers are after many decades good enough and modern computers fast enough that it is rare that I need to dig into the assembly (but I happens, compiler explorer is in my bookmark bar in Firefox).

Other abstractions are far leakier, it is far more common that I look in wireshark to debug network issues, the application level view is often not enough.

One of the leakiest abstractions currently is LLMs. Maybe in a decade or three they will be good enough, but they aren't yet, that's for sure. At least for the hard realtime systems level programming I do. For code generation they often make enough mistakes that the time spent after review and fixes comes out in the wash, even for simple tools. Their use for bug finding, RAG and similar is however promising.

Compilers are orders of magnitude more reliable than LLMs. There's a reason the saying is "it's not a compiler error".

I have a standing challenge to my co-workers that valid compiler errors will be rewarded like a birthday party, with the baked goods, alcohol, or sweets of their choice. It's only been redeemed once, and I've found less than a dozen unreported compiler bugs myself.

> I'm sure they were blindly accepting the Assembly coming out of the compiler.

The fact that you consider deterministic output from a compiler the same as probabilistic output from a LLM makes me think you don't know how either of those things work, even at a very superficial level.

> out of the compiler

You mean a source that's been tested on billions of PCs over 45+ years?

As opposed to a LLM which outputs code that barely works on my machine™?

If you think that's a good analogy you're in the wronf industry ....

Where do you think those bugs reports for gcc and others come from? Some people do look at the assembly coming out of the compilers.

Currently the openbsd mailing list for port is currently going through a clang update and one of the main point is looking at all the packages that failed to build. I even took a long look at the usb stack and the audio subsystem of OpenBSD because of an issue I was having with my DAC.