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by bakugo 460 days ago
Those aren't the same thing at all, and you already mentioned why in your comment: leakiness. The higher up you go on the abstraction chain, the leakier the abstractions become, and the less viable it is to produce quality software without understanding the layer(s) below.

You can generally trust that transistors won't randomly malfunction and give you wrong results. You can generally trust that your compiler won't generate the wrong assembly, or that your interpreter won't interpret your code incorrectly. You can generally trust that your language's automatic memory management won't corrupt memory. It might be useful to understand how those layers work anyway, but it's usually not a hard requirement.

But once you reach a certain level of abstraction (usually 1 level above programming language), you'll start running into more and more issues resulting from abstraction leaks that require understanding the layer below to properly fix. Probably the most blatant example of this nowadays are "React developers" who don't know JS/CSS/HTML and WILL constantly be running into issues that they can't properly solve as a result, and are forced to either give up or write the most deranged workarounds imaginable that consist of hundreds of lines of unintelligible spaghetti.

AI is the highest level of abstraction so far, and as a result, it's also the leakiest abstraction so far. You CANNOT write proper functional and maintainable code using an LLM without having at least a decent understanding of what it's outputting, unless you're writing baby's first todo app or something.

1 comments

> But once you reach a certain level of abstraction (usually 1 level above programming language), you'll start running into more and more issues resulting from abstraction leaks that require understanding the layer below to properly fix. Probably the most blatant example of this nowadays are "React developers" who don't know JS/CSS/HTML and WILL constantly be running into issues that they can't properly solve as a result, and are forced to either give up or write the most deranged workarounds imaginable that consist of hundreds of lines of unintelligible spaghetti.

I want to frame this. I am sick to death of every other website and application needing a gig of RAM and making my damn phone hot in my hand.