maybe the gap people are trying to fill with AI is the impossibility of catching up in a world that's heavily specialized, but largely hasn't taken the effort to re-compress that complexity into routes that don't rely on you knowing the abstraction stack that gets you there

I forget who it was, but an old 'blogposter once said that he didn't understand why people were lamenting that "the new generation of junior programmers ("first years on the job" kinda) didn't know anything at all about how the underlying hardware worked".

His rebuttal was that the previous generation succeeded so thoroughly that the new one no longer needed to learn the entire abstraction stack to get started, and instead will eventually use that head start to do the same for the next one. the older generation (we're talking about like, 30 year timelines not actual generations) will need to keep alive how things work, and there will need to be specialists who learn it, but it is no longer a prerequesite to do software dev at all.

and i wonder what magic would happen if we actually took that seriously, in computing in specific, but ideally in every industry and field