Top voices on simplicity: Sandi Metz, Casey Muratori, Martin Kleppmann, Naval Ravikant and 7 others.
They argue over when to share code, whether the classic clean-code rules help, and what hiding the details costs.
Our reading of what a group of claims have in common, one level above a korrent: a korrent is our reading of what somebody said, a view is our reading of what several korrents share. The claims are printed under it, so the sentence can be checked against them.
Nobody is filed under a view — claims are. A person is named here because a dated claim of theirs sits under it, and somebody whose claims sit under two views appears under both.
A viewour reading
Their wordsDuplicating logic is no longer painful. Abstractions still are.
Their wordsJust imagine you use very bad software and um the team that started the project decided early to use Xamarin and then they never had a chance of making this as good as all the other things you really appreciate on your phone due to this decision no matter how good they are.
Their wordsduplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction
Their wordsLike a good compressor, I don't reuse anything until I have at least two instances of it occurring.
Their wordsExisting code exerts a powerful influence. Its very presence argues that it is both correct and necessary.
Their wordsOnce an abstraction is proved wrong the best strategy is to re-introduce duplication and let it show you what's right.
Their wordsIf you find yourself passing parameters and adding conditional paths through shared code, the abstraction is incorrect.
A viewour reading
Their wordsThey've got blog posts of we had to rewrite this whole thing because the performance was bad. If it was always hotspots that made your performance bad, you'd never have to rewrite the whole thing. So, we know that that doesn't work anymore.
Their wordsIf you look at those things, they're kind of just bad programming practices. I I don't really know how else to say them. They don't mesh well when you put them together.
Their wordsCode is procedurally oriented, and the "objects" are simply constructs that arise that allow procedures to be reused.
A viewour reading
Mental modelsLeaky abstractions, Conservation of complexity
Their wordsBut, somebody still has to build those lower-level abstractions and from lower-level components. Somebody's got to implement the cloud services.
Mental modelLeaky abstractions
Their wordsAnd I think with AI we're also moving up the layers of abstraction. So we're not writing every function by hand, like no one's doing that. But the more context that you do have about how it works under the hood, so how React works, you know, how our props being passed through, we're much better equipped to actually debug and build things that are resilient.
Mental modelsFirst principles, Leaky abstractions
Their wordsYou can take this all the way down, but it always helps to have knowledge one layer below because you’re getting closer to reality.
Mental modelLeaky abstractions
Their wordsAnd all abstractions are leaky. So when you have a computer programming for you—when you have Claude Code or equivalent programming for you—it’s going to make mistakes.
Mental modelsLeaky abstractions, Trade-offs
Their wordsProgramming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.
A viewour reading
Mental modelLeaky abstractions
Their wordsI think the "difficulty" of software engineering is essentially constant no matter what abstraction level you move to, because human cognition adapts to new tools until it can fully utilize itself.
Their wordsAnd it's effectively the next step of, you know, every phase of of software evolution is just like a rising tide of abstractions. This is the next abstraction.
Mental modelLeaky abstractions
Filed here becauseOn the question and under none of the views: it argues an agent is not an abstraction at all.
Their wordsBut we should not lie to ourselves and call it an abstraction in the same way that a programming language is an abstraction. It is a delegation of a task to a non-deterministic agent.
Matched by wording, not yet read into a view. The archive grows on its own, so this is where new claims wait for somebody to read them.
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