There are some people who still know these things, and are able to use LLMs far more effectively than those who do not.

I've seen the following prediction by a few people and am starting to agree with it: software development (and possibly most knowledge work) will become like farming. A relatively smaller number of people will do with large machines what previously took armies of people. There will always be some people exploring the cutting edge of thought, and feeding their insights into the machine, just how I image there are biochemists and soil biology experts who produce knowledge to inform decisions made by the people running large farming operations.

I imagine this will lead to profound shifts in the world that we can hardly predict. If we don't blow ourselves up, perhaps space exploration and colonization will become possible.

> Can you create incredibly useful code without that knowledge today?

You could do that without that knowledge back in the day too, we had languages that were higher level than assembler for forever.

It's just that the range of knowledge needed to maximize machine usage is far smaller now. Before you had to know how to write a ton of optimizations, nowadays you have to know how to write your code so the compiler have easy job optimizing it.

Before you had to manage the memory accesses, nowadays making sure you're not jumping actross memory too much and being aware how cache works is enough

I don't think it's odd. Sacrificing deep understanding, and delegating that responsibility to others is risky. In more concrete terms, if your livelihood depends on application development, you have concrete dependencies on platforms, frameworks, compilers, operating systems, and other abstractions that without which you might not be able to perform your job.

Fewer abstractions, deeper understanding, fewer dependencies on others. These concepts show up over and over and not just in software. It's about safety.