I like Adrian's 2nd thought. Amazing to see how technology advancement keeps lifting the level of abstraction.
written by Stefan Christoph
I like Adrian’s 2nd thought. Amazing to see how technology advancement keeps lifting the level of abstraction.
While I learned some assembler back in the old days, pretty soon it wasn’t anything I was spending time on. Back at Siemens Mobile I was an App guy, purely writing application code in good old plain C, while our device driver guys were still coding in assembler. Clash of worlds when we had a production line standing still due to non-booting phones. Me and the device driver guy staring at the hardware debugger screen. He was wondering about those bloated C-structures the application stack created, then quickly pointed out an issue in the assembly code being shown right next to the C code. I never looked at it when I was debugging app issues. I would have never been able to spot the issue.
So I guess we need to make sure we don’t lose the ability to dive deep to identify and solve issues way down in the abstraction layers. Most likely provided by some specialized AI Agents though…
📝 Last updated: August 14, 2026 — Repaired a title that the LinkedIn import had truncated mid-word