Nobody knows how the whole system works

The core operating principle of which says capitalism requires and promotes systems that enforce the separation of labor from the product they produce. This precludes fellow laborers from meaningfully communicating with each other; knowledge sharing could expose more of how the product "works" after all! Only in final combination, following an undisclosed (to the worker) larger plan, does the product become whole and provide utility.

So not knowing "what happens" in layers "above" and "below" you for your specific work unit is key. This is the "de-skilling" tenet of capitalism and is required for exploitation, conformity, at scale. As labor units become smaller, they require less skill and time to produce, rendering laborers "conditioned to a machine." In other words, workers must acquiesce their skills in the name of "progress" of the system itself. This can easily be sold to the laborers, couched by real world data highlighting the obvious efficiency gains, along with a heavy bonus of having to do less work yourself.

Only by making ever smaller parts of a whole, awhile hiding the utility of those parts produced, can capital rob labor of their value (their skill, their products, their output.)

This very same system lends itself to outcompeting private labor by way of parallelization: as it just so happens that smaller slices of work tend to parallelize better than larger ones. If you can operate at a scale that bespoke creators have no chance of replicating on their own, you "win!" The beautiful moat, the envy of all.

In other words, you're just describing being a worker in a highly efficient capitalist machine! Look! We're almost there! I can just about smell all the "winning" from here...

At the same time, you only need to learn how to fry an egg once, and you won't forget it. You can go your entire life without ever having to fry an egg yourself - but if you ever had to, you could.

When it comes to coding, the analogy breaks down, I think. Aside from the obviously different stakes (survival versus control of your device), coding also requires keeping up with a lot of changing domain knowledge. It'd be as if an egg is one week savoury, another week sweet, and another a poisonous mushroom. It's also less of a single skill like writing a for loop, and more of a combination of skills and experiments, like organizing a banquet.

Coding today suffers from having too many types of eggs, many of which exist because some communities prefer them. I also don't like the solution "let the LLM do it", but it's much easier. Still, if we manage to stabilize patterns for the majority of use cases, frying the proverbial egg will no longer be as much of domain knowledge, choice or elitism as it is today.

Abstractions come with both syntactic and semantic behaviour specifications. In other words their implementation can have bugs. An LLM never has a bug, it always produces "something", whether this is what you wanted is on you to verify.

Only because they're all painful. If there was a bank that was recognized as perfect, people would switch in short order. Switching to another bank that is also painful is not worth the effort.

> I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

Only because nobody else sells an iPhone. People would start switching over to other, less buggy iPhone on the market if there was such a thing.

> You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.

The efficient market theory says that, in an active market, prices rapidly reflect all publicly available information. How does that apply here, bunk or not?