The key point being made there is that we can separate the intention from the implementation details. The key aspect of programming isn’t in banging out lines of code. It’s understanding the behavior of the system being implemented, the states that it flows through, and how the user interacts with it. These are the core skills, and they lie at the level of abstraction where there is a significant overlap between coding and design.

I don’t think it’s so much that we don’t need skills to work at a detailed level of code anymore, but that we shouldn’t see them as an essential part. Like you said, there are still people who know how to write assembly by hand, but they’re few and far between, working in specific niches where extreme optimization is required. A general coder doesn’t really think about what’s happening at hardware level at all.

My read of the article was more that we should expand the conception of what we mean by coding to include people who work at a higher level of abstraction as well.