The creative process is not dependent on the abstraction.

> For me, lots of programming is the same. I just want to assemble the pieces

How did those pieces came to be? By someone assembling other pieces or by someone crafting them together out of nowhere because nobody else had written them by the time?

Of course you reuse other parts and abstractions to do whatever things that you're not working on but each time you do something that hasn't been done before you can't but engage the creative process, even if you're sitting on top of 50 years worth of abstractions.

In other words, what a programmer essentially has is a playfield. And whether the playfield is a stack of transistors or coding agents, when you program you create something new even if it's defined and built in terms of the playfield.