This is a great point. For me it isn't poetic at all, but a deductible consequence.

If our job is creating abstractions it must be really hard to create tools which abstract properly our job. Where abstract properly would be separating what is really our job, the abstractions we are creating, and what are the trivial abstractions, the ones we assume as stable. This is a hard path to reach any usefull conclusions or insights to develop new programming tool features. The separation from what are the abstractions we're creating and the abstractions we're building on top off is always changing and it's in the same place (in the code).

For reaching usefull conclusions I would rather think in the different tasks developers need to pursue. Who wants to build a RescueTimeesque tool for developers?

Lisp, with his code is data super-feature, and his REPL super-environment has a lot to say in this two issues.