[scarface74]

Everything eventually gets boiled down to libraries. The purpose of technology is to get things done. I could say the same that it makes me sad that today’s developers use high level languages without ever knowing assembly. A chip designer could say that assembly language developers are saddened that the assembly language programmer never had to learn how processors are created.

[mirker]

It’s fine when the library is a tight abstraction. Unfortunately, ML libraries are leaky.

Example: take a classification model and change the output dimensions without understanding the model.

[nmstoker]

Yes, the challenge people then face is that if they lack too much intuition for the subject, they can't spot obvious issues.

We've all seen how ML people don't necessarily have to have the skills to solve a problem (ie i don't need to speak Vietnamese to make a "passable" ML translator) but it's not long before the lack of knowledge starts to show up embarrassing shortfalls - being too arms length about any topic is a recipe for disaster!