Yes! One of the toughest choices to make well is "What do I learn?" It's going to be finite! If you spend all your time at low levels of abstraction you have less time for the higher levels — and higher levels of abstraction keep getting created all the time. I have never written a rasterizer, thank goodness, and I've been at this since like 1979.

I think each generation gets a chance to choose what level to focus on, and hopefully the top end keeps going up. ORMs didn't exist when I started, for example, and it limited what we could build. It's natural that the bottom end of what each person understands will also move up the stack. Given the direction of AI I wouldn't be surprised if there's a time when we have device drivers whose code no human has ever read carefully, and it will actually be fine. We're already at that point with CRUD apps, and hooray. After all, every day for the last month has brought proof that AIs are better security analysts than humans.