At increasing levels of skill, smaller atomic subtasks can be mentally grouped together, forming a new compound unit for mental manipulation. This compound unit can then form an atomic unit at the next higher level of abstraction.
For example, when first learning a writing system, at first each line and stroke is an intentional activity of recall. With practice, the strokes for a given character can be intuitively recalled and chained together; writing the letter “A” is no longer a combination of three lines, but the atomic unit of word construction. From there, we can progress to the whole-word as a mental base unit, and then the sentence, then larger and more abstract units still; at each stage, improved familiarity with the basis and structure of the symbols being manipulated allows them to be fractally compounded together.
When we teach people, we are trying to impart these representations.
Technology facilitates the same kind of compounding. We don’t need to think in transistors, we can think in logic gates, then make processors and code more abstractly on those.