The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me,

The idea that we will have some abstraction that will someday (in the foreseeable future) save us from all of this difficult work sounds very far fetched to me, and I can’t imagine how that would work. We actually can imagine how a natural-language driven "black box" that translates it into code works: it's called offshore software development. The conclusion that everyone eventually reaches, having experienced varying levels of pain first depending on how quickly they learn, is that writing a spec detailed enough to make that work is as much or more work than just writing the code yourself!