My C compiler has been generating assembly code for me for 30 years. And people were saying the same thing even earlier about how compilers and HLLs made developers dumb because they couldn't code in asm.
I like to call that “unary thinking”. Nothing is “perfect”, therefore everything is “imperfect”, so everything is the “same”. One category for everything, unary.
Every 5 years or so of my career something new has come out to make coding easier and every time a stack of people like yourself come out to argue it's making devs dumb or worse.
LLMs still generate terrible output a lot of the time but they are improving. Early compilers generated terrible ASM a lot of the time to the point that it was common to use inline assembly in your code or rewrite parts later. Tools can improve, the point is that neither make the dev worse they just add to productivity.
Writing code isn't my job it's a task I do to make the systems I design functional.
So we're not making up stuff, this perspective was ubiquitous among assembly programmers of the 1950s. In 1958 (as the first article I link to mentions), half of programs were written in Fortran. Which means half of people still thought writing assembly by hand was the way to go.
I've personally written assembly by hand for money on an obscure architecture, and I've also written a non-optimizing compiler for a subset of Rust to avoid the assembly. There is great joy in playing stack tetris, but changing code requires a lot of effort. Imagine if there weren't great alternatives, you'd just get good at it.
I imagine if there weren't compilers (or interpreter) I would never have learned how to code. My generation of programmers was taught with Java and in my university course we did all our homework in the first year using BlueJay, a program that made it _even easier_ to get up and running with a bit of Java code.
(just to save some face: I learned Prolog in my second year).
Not quite what the OP claims but see for example the Story of Mel:
I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.
``If a program can't rewrite its own code'',
he asked, ``what good is it?''
The joke story is mocking the common arguments/beliefs at the time.
If you expect me to source you a collection of comments about "real programmers" from over 30 years ago though that is too much of an ask but I was there, I read it often and I started fairly late on the scene in the 90s.
if i can one day have a similar level of confidence in LLM output, as i do in a compiler, then i will also call it an abstraction. until then…i wait. :)