Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary, that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating more boilerplate to get what you want from a library.

Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures and short-lived intermediate data structures or type definitions. This is the beginning of boilerplate.

So many advances in removing boilerplate are realizing your 5 function calls and 10 intermediate data structures or type definitions, essentially compute a thing that you can do with 0 function calls and 0 custom datatypes and less lines of code.

The abstraction hides how simple the thing you want is.

Problem is that all open source code looks like the bloat described above, so LLMs have no idea how to actually write code that is without boilerplate. The only place where I've seen it work is in shaders, which are usually written to avoid common pitfalls of abstraction.

LLMs are incapable of writing a big program in 1 function and 1 file, that does what you want. Splitting the program into functions or even multiple files, is a step you do after a lot of time, yet all open source looks nothing like that.

Yep, people not understanding the value of abstraction is exactly why LLM coded apps are going to be a shit show. You could use them to come up with better abstractions, but most will not.

> Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue.

I don’t think I agree. Here is an example.

QTcpSocket socket; socket.connectToHost(QHostAddress::LocalHost, 1234);

Vs:

int clientSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);

    sockaddr_in serverAddr;
    serverAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    serverAddr.sin_port = htons(1234);
    inet_pton(AF_INET, "127.0.0.1", &serverAddr.sin_addr);

    connect(clientSocket, (sockaddr*)&serverAddr, sizeof(serverAddr))