Today's tools contain yesterday's hard work
At one of my first software jobs, I had a coworker who was a wizard with grep, sed, awk, regular expressions, xargs, and tail. He would pipe them together to solve a problem while I wrote a hundred-line Java program.
I sometimes think about how his hard work, and the work of people like him who shared what they learned, is one of the main reasons we can just do things now.