> What determines the flight level of understanding you need to function?

The level where r and fl are seen as different letters?

Look, I know this comes off like I'm being an ass, which means I am being an ass, and I'm sorry. I also make many mistakes and need much forgiveness.

I'm also seeing many more innocent typos such as yours on HN. Does it matter? I don't know. Every other response to your question seemed to understand that you meant "right" instead of "flight", but that's also the kind of error, i.e. `if x=1` instead of `if x==1` which is easy to make but not always easy to catch visually when you are looking at the logic internal to the loop.

For me at least I have to be able to believe I can understand any part of the stack if I want in reasonable effort. I would happily dive into semiconductor physics if I happen to want to (I'm a former physicist so the atom level I pretty much already learnt at school).

A strict, formal, reproducible way to communicate with the machine.

A compiler is a rather predictable piece of software; reproducible builds are a thing. An LLM has approximate knowledge of many things, and approximate and fuzzy ways to do anything even moderately complex. This is great for research, ok for planning, and it sucks for execution. The fact that LLMs can write satisfactorily working code from high-level requests is a miracle, and, as with most miracles, we're likely not noticing something, being dazzled by the slight previously unseen.

Not OP but similar type of brain here. Certain types of abstractions make me uncomfortable, the worst being "trust me bro" type web framework abstractions where there isn't a direct link between A and B, just a contract definition that says "A and B will integrate... somehow".

When an API says it takes something, I need to know the exact form of that "thing". Saying "you can give it this object" doesn't suit me because where are the edge cases, where are the interactions, how can I know for sure I'm giving it what it needs. The docs never tell you where to find the object def, then you spend 3 hours diving into the source code to understand it's just a two item struct or something.

LLMs introduced an explosion of complexity, suddenly code bases sprout out of nowhere, and there's no point in following all the different datapaths through because the guy who loves testing out the latest claude will just change everything in a few days anyway.

With low level programming, nearly everything is just raw data, aligned to meaning. I like to tell juniors confused about file types, that file types are a social construct, they're just a bag of bytes with some structure. Same thing applies with low level programming. You know what a byte is, you know the endianness, the signedness, you can feel comfort in knowing you're not missing anything, and then you build up from there seeing each block build upon the previous.

Enough to build an appropriate mental model for a brain set up to tackle problems this way.

Not the person you are responding to, but for me I really like to have a general understanding of how things work under the covers, but then have confidence that the contracts between me and those lower layers are rock solid, and that's simply not the case with LLMs.

Take software. In college I took computer architecture and digital logic design courses, and I thought they were immensely valuable in understanding how computers actually work and what software is actually doing. Sure, modern chip design is obviously several orders of magnitude more complex that what I studied, but I understand the basic concepts, and more importantly I have faith that chip designers do understand the nitty gritty details. Moving up the stack, I also had to build a rudimentary compiler in college. Again, modern compilers are a lot more complex, but I know that if something breaks, there is an identifiable bug either in my code or the compiler (or maybe even the chip). And importantly, while I may not have the skills to debug all the layers, when someone explains the bug to me, I can understand it in context (e.g. I'm not a chip designer but I thoroughly understand how Spectre is exploited and mitigated).

LLMs are nothing like that. Not even their builders understand the low level details. They're inherently stochastic systems, so people get slightly different results every time they're run. There is no "clean interface with a contract". And perhaps most importantly, many programmers are still expected to be responsible for their code, even when AI agents are generating so much of it that it's impossible to understand (or even read) it all. That's the thing that really stresses me out, when I'm responsible for a system but I don't really understand how it works.