> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.

This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.

If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.

As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.

I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.