[Legend2440]

>And now I'm working with LLMs, the most opaque abstraction of them all!

You put a black box around it to fit it into the world of abstractions that traditional programs live in.

But I'd say the most interesting thing about neural networks is that they do not have any abstractions within them. They're programs, but programs created by an optimization algorithm just turning knobs to minimize the loss.

This creates very different kinds of programs - large, data-driven programs that can integrate huge amounts of information into their construction. It's a whole new domain with very different properties than traditional software built out of stacked abstractions.