Also dont forget about deskilling. Right now its fine because you are able to debug. But it would get gradualy lot harder if you are not flexing that muscle.

> Also dont forget about deskilling

de-skilling (reducing skills), not desk killing, for anyone else as illiterate as me

>I want a tool, not a slave. I don't want it to be "smart", but an extension of my body.

Yup, that is exactly what AI autocomplete is. AI does the boring parts, you do the thinking.

>I haven't liked the current ML field since the beginning (early 2010s in my case) for this reason.

That is your problem. You are stuck in 2010s. But the last couple years have had giant enormous leaps.

Since you need to understand your programs at the deepest level I assume you write in assembly and don’t use third party libraries.

There was an era when car owners were expected to be their own mechanics.

When that started going away, I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".

"Deepest level" in GP presumably refers to the deepest level of the existing source code.

> I wonder if the people who lamented the loss ever got hit with "I assume you fractionate your own petroleum".

Those were the days. Nothing like that delicious smell of crude oil vapour as the fractionation column warms up…

Layers of abstraction vs. predigested programming slop.