LLMs bring new nature of abstraction – up and sideways

I don't get his argument, and if it wasn't Martin Fowler I would just dismiss it. He admits himself that it's not an abstraction over previous activity as it was with HLLs, but rather a new activity altogether - that is prompting LLMs for non-deterministic outputs.

Even if we assume there is value in it, why should it replace (even if in part) the previous activity of reliably making computers do exactly what we want?

Because unreliably solving a harder problem with LLMs is much more valuable than reliably solving an easier problem without.

I'm pretty deep into these things and have never had them solve a harder problem than I can solve. They just solve problems I can solve much, much faster.

Maybe that does add up to solving harder higher level real world problems (business problems) from a practical standpoint, perhaps that's what you mean rather than technical problems.

Or maybe you're referring to producing software which utilizes LLMs, rather than using LLMs to program software (which is what I think the blog post is about, but we should certainly discuss both.)