Until recently I thought "load-bearing seam" was a satirical exaggeration - I'd seen both claudisms independently but never combined. But a couple of days ago it hit me with "The key structural point first: the only load-bearing seam is [...]"

Fair...

I was just thinking of this exact comic, which is etched into my brain for some reason.

The obvious counter to this is that we've been going through this evolution of increasing abstraction as developers for nearly a century now.

In the 40s and well into the 60s, most code was written either as straight up machine code or an assembly language. MS DOS is almost entirely assembly.

UNIX ushered in the era of "high level" portable languages like C, Fortran, and Pascal that some developers hated because they felt like they were losing the fine-grained control that they had with assembly. The compilers just "weren't as good" as humans at optimisation!

Then the compilers got better and people started using garbage-collected languages like Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, and C#. Similarly, many people bemoaned the lack of control over memory allocation, lower efficiency, etc.

We're simply stepping up to the next level of abstraction.

Look at it this way: decades ago when I first discovered C++ templates, it felt like waving a magic wand in the direction of the computer. It blew my mind that I could simply substitute "float" instead of "double" in between some angle brackets and the compiler would write reams of code for me!

We simply have better magic wands and more powerful spells now.

I think there’s a kind of laundering that goes on. Like if leadership just told devs to go build something (gave them a prompt) and the devs picked some defaults, leadership wouldn’t like it, they’d want some different interpretation of the prompt, there’d be lots of back and forth.

Somehow when it’s the LLM that makes the choices, everyone is impressed with what AI did. It’s really just whatever defaults have been trained in, but somehow we’re ok with this.

Part of it is better marketing and communication. Basically the defaults of OpenAI and Anthropic are better than what a random dev will pick. But it’s not really that natural language is a better interface, it’s more that having “AI” for now somehow intermediates responsibility so everyone is ok with what it picked, when they probably wouldn’t accept the same if the internal team came up with it. It’s not too different from hiring consultants.

I disagree. I speak in code to the LLMs. It's just that LLMs are really good at reinventing the wheel that you were supposed to in your codebase. Recent example.

struct TensorView<T>{ body: Arc<[T]>, shape: [usize], stride: [usize], offset: usize, }

Okay now fill in all the helper methods. And GPT 5.6 Sol did a good job.

I suspect a lot of "the right abstractions" would be fuzzy and opaque things - more alike to modern AI than to anything from the domain of traditional programming. Because the world is just cursed like that.

There is no right abstraction to make runnable human vagueness.

At one point someone have to take "what you think it should do" into defined unambiguous spec that is called "code"

DNA is still too close to molecular biology than the actual problem of harvesting free energy and replicating.

I think we see this pattern over and over and it might just be that the problem domain is a weird projection into more dimensions of complexity than it makes sense to directly model.

I've always loved things that grow. Maybe we should name the first frame for work Primavera.

I kid you not, I remember writing an example solution with comments explaining how we were approaching the problem. Copilot wrote most of the actual code via autocomplete. And that was a year ago, models have got a lot better since then.

Maybe this one will even be successful!