The programmer doesn’t have to write their own abstraction.
All certified Z wave devices use the standard Z wave commandsets.
All certified ZHA (zigbee home automation profile) Devices use the standard zigbee clusters.
Smartthings offers its own abstraction layer.
So the programmer writes smartthings code to send the appropriate information using the standardized protocol For that specific device.
It means you do have to know whether it’s a zigbee device or a Z wave device when you write the device type handler, but you don’t have to know much more than that in most cases.
Again, the developer docs will explain most of this and you can ask additional questions in the developer section of the forum.
Here’s a discussion from that section of the forum from someone who is not a programmer and was writing theIr first device type handler.
