alt Hacker NewsThe narrative is that non-LLM adopters will be left behind, lose their jobs, are Luddites, yadda yadda yadda because they are not moving up the abstraction layers by adopting LLMs to improve their output. There is no point in the timeframe of the story at which Mel would have benefitted from a move to a higher abstraction level by adopting the optimizing compiler because its output will always be drastically inferior to his own using his native expertise.
That's not the narrative in this thread. That's a broader narrative than the one in this thread.
And yes, as I said, the point is not that Mel would benefit, it's that each time a new higher level of abstraction comes onto the scene, it is accessible to more people than the previous level. This was the pattern with machine code to symbolic assembly, it was the pattern with assembly to compiled languages, with higher level languages, and now with "prompting".
The comment I originally replied to implied that this current new abstraction layer is totally different than all the previous ones, and all I said is that I don't think so, I think the comparison is indeed apt. Part of that pattern is that a lot of new people can adopt this new layer of abstraction, even while many people who already know how to program are likely to remain more effective without it.