How do you justify it against all the other abstractions you've accepted and no longer know how to do (or never learned in the first place). Why are the current set of manual steps the right level to be permanently aware of?
"But what about what runs the compiler! What about what runs the OS! What about the physics involved in electron transfer!" Diminishing returns I guess? No one's ever said you needed to understand everything, but understanding or at least being aware of a few layers under you seems to have been common sense forever. Taking one abstraction layer step up doesn't really change that.
It would be like saying being an engineering manager is a different abstraction layer. It's not. It's an entirely different domain, managing people and resources instead of programming machines directly
If we invent a meta-farmer profession (for those who hired a farmer) I will be great meta-farmer, but still suck as a farmer
“In order to be effective working at any layer of abstraction you must have in-depth knowledge of the layer below where you’re at”.
To be the most effective at AI assisted engineering (if treated as an abstraction layer) you need to understand how code works, behaves, architectures etc. and what well performing, well built things look like. Doesn’t necessarily mean you have to know everything like you would pre-AI, but enough to be effective.
And manual steps are good. At least you know what is happening.
The old Unix philosophy. Simple tools that combined become powerful.
If you use _anything_ in production, you better make sure you understand the stack.
Edit: But actually, one of my favorite Git explainers is https://wildlyinaccurate.com/a-hackers-guide-to-git/
LOL! There was actually a time (way back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth) when that was actually how it was done. ;)
(I remember as a kid having to look-up hexadecimal 6502 CPU opcodes on a chart then type in a huge list of hex into the computer to write "machine code" if you wanted anything faster and more powerful than BASIC.)
No wonder we boot up entire browser engines to write simple text editors. But hey, we gotta be first to market to get that VC money, right?
Abstractions are not a convenience, they're a cognitive necessity, compressing large aspects of the problem space into easy to not think about blocks, allowing humans, with their limited working memory, to reason about larger problems. The only reason a seasoned developer can think at a high/system level is because of the abstractions/compressions they've formed in their heads.
Technology exists to make it so we don't have to think about/put time into low level things, so we can do more interesting things instead. Not thinking about banal things is the foundation of progress.
AI seems to be the give us an abstraction I've been waiting for: a method to write code at the level of libraries , with libraries working with/adapting to other libraries.
Our end users are who should benefit. You’re the pilot in the seat who doesn’t know what the throttle is and you’re telling the passenger it’s the plane’s fault it’s slow.
I don't follow.
> because you do not want to put in the work.
Yes, just as nobody wants to type opcodes, or write their own http clients, or etc. It's why most of us use higher level languages. Leave the solved things solved, and work on actually interesting/new things! That doesn't mean not understanding, it just means not wasting time on the same boilerplate/code duplicated by millions of developers.
Consumer software is slower than ever. And only getting worse.
This is how you get faster software. You literally look “into” the code, see why stuff is slow, remove the extra work in the library that you do not need, and now your software has a faster server.
Abstractions make software “easy” to build. We’re not looking for done easily, we’re looking for done well.
The window of what steps technical people should understand in our stack of abstraction is always changing - there is no permanent window we should hold as sacred (outside of a cursory knowledge of the lowest of low levels - being passingly familiar with how machine code works is valuable to everyone) but the levels we should be aware of should exceed the levels that we casually interact with - we should at least be rather comfortable with the level one deeper than the one we often interact with.