[seethishat]

Abstractions have been happening since the 1970s when ASM was replaced by the C Programming Language. From there we got C++ (look, it actually has a string type that most humans understand!) then we got memory safe managed languages like Go that is almost human readable, runs almost everywhere and doesn't have buffer overflows.

ASM was machine specific. C was portable but required expert programmers. C++ was even more user friendly, but still very hard for normal people. Today, most anyone can write a program in Go.

The more we abstract, the less knowledge/expertise is needed. So yes, programs are being built by people who don't really understand what they are doing. That is intended.

[FromTheFirstIn]

Abstractions truncate the decision space of the layer above them by making understandable trade offs. LLMs don’t abstract anything, your code is still in python or php or Go. It just feels like they abstract if you don’t understand the output since not understanding the layer down is what we associate with non-leaky reliable abstractions. LLMs are abstractions the same way that your code editor is an abstraction- it’s not a layer, it’s an interface.