alt Hacker NewsI think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead.
You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
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Now we have to figure out how to recite the right incantation to Claude to get it to recite the right incantation to Gradle in an exchange redolent of "guess the verb" from old Adventure games. Best case if you get it wrong: nothing happens. Worst case: grue will eat you.
Sanchez's Law of Abstraction applies. You haven't abstracted anything away, just added more shit to the pile.
The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions.
Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.