An abstraction doesn't cease to be one because it's imperfect, or even wrong.

I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.

I do not think determinism of behaviour is the only thing that matters for evaluating the value of an abstraction - exposure to the output is also a consideration.

The behaviour of the = operator in Python is certainly deterministic and well-documented, but depending on context it can result in either a copy (2x memory consumption) or a pointer (+64bit memory consumption). Values that were previously pointers can also suddenly become copies following later permutation. Do you think this through every time you use =? The consequences of this can be significant (e.g. operating on a large file in memory); I have seen SWEs make errors in FastAPI multipart upload pipelines that have increased memory consumption by 2x, 3x, in this manner.

Meanwhile I can ask an LLM to generate me Rust code, and it is clearly obvious what impact the generated code has on memory consumption. If it is a reassignment (b = a) it will be a move, and future attempts to access the value of a would refuse to compile and be highlighted immediately in an IDE linter. If the LLM does b = &a, it is clearly borrowing, which has the size of a pointer (+64bits). If the LLM did b = a.clone(), I would clearly be able to see that we are duplicating this data structure in memory (2x consumption).

The LLM code certainly is non-deterministic; it will be different depending on the questions I asked (unlike a compiler). However, in this particular example, the chosen output format/language (Rust) directly exposes me to the underlying behaviour in a way that is both lower-level than Python (what I might choose to write quick code myself) yet also much, much more interpretable as a human than, say, a binary that GCC produces. I think this has significant value.

Unrelated to the gp post, but isn't LLMs more like a deterministic chaotic system than a "non-deterministic" one? "Tiny changes to the input can change the output quite a lot" is similar to "extreme sensitivity to initial condition" property of a chaotic system.

I guess that could be a problematic behavior if you want reproducibility ala (relatively) reproducible abstraction like compilers. With LLMs, there are too many uncontrollable variables to precisely reproduce a result from the same input.

This is meaningless. An LLM is also deterministic if configured to be so, and any library, framework, module can be non-deterministic if built to be. It's not a distinguishing factor.

The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do.

Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly.

That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent.

For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't.

> Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job.

I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here.

I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done.

This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself.

1. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating

I think what you're trying to reference is APIs or libraries, most of which I wouldn't consider abstractions. I would hope most senior front-end developers are capable of developing a date library for their use case, but in almost all cases it's better to use the built in Date class, moment, etc. But that's not an abstraction.

There's an interesting comparison in delegation where for example people that stop programming through delegation do lose their skills over time.