[ihumanable]

Lots of abstractions have an escape hatch down to the lower level, you can put assembly in your C code, most ORMs have some way to just run a query, etc.

I think the question I have is, what benefit does this provide? Let's say we could wave a magic wand and you can operate at any layer of abstraction. Is this beneficial in some way? The article is about leaky abstractions and states

> One reason the law of leaky abstractions is problematic is that it means that abstractions do not really simplify our lives as much as they were meant to.

I think I'm just struggling to understand how this would help with that.

[cloogshicer]

It would help because you could tackle the problem at hand always at the right layer of abstraction.

If a certain aspect of the problem can be solved easily in a higher layer of abstraction, great! Let's solve it at that layer, because it's usually easier and allows for more expressiveness.

But whenever we need more control, we can seamlessly drop down to the lower layer and work there.

I think we need to find a fundamental principle that allows this. But I see barely anyone working on this - instead we keep trying to find higher and higher layers of abstractions (LLMs being the most recent addition) in the hopes they will get rid of the need of dealing with the lower layers. Which is a false hope, I feel.