Pedro Chambino
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Pedro Chambino
@pchambino.bsky.social
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Principal Engineer @ Carwow
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Reposted by Pedro Chambino
jezhumble.net
While I’m on the topic of AI agents, I was re-reading the Joel on Software classic “The Law of Leaky Abstractions” and came across this gem. The article has aged well. www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/t...
The law of leaky abstractions means that whenever somebody comes up with a wizzy new code-generation tool that is supposed to make us all ever-so-efficient, you hear a lot of people saying “learn how to do it manually first, then use the wizzy tool to save time.” Code generation tools which pretend to abstract out something, like all abstractions, leak, and the only way to deal with the leaks competently is to learn about how the abstractions work and what they are abstracting. So the abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us time learning. And all this means that paradoxically, even as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.
May 3, 2025 at 8:25 PM