Magic

Jeremy clarifies ‘magic’ in this context.

I’m not talking about acts of prestidigitation and illusion. I mean the kind of magic that’s used to market technologies. It’s magic. It just works. Don’t think about it.

Thanks to our acceptance and adoption of coding abstraction layers — (think frameworks & libraries) — it was pretty much inevitable that we’d go for the next step: AI generated code.

[…] Developers can now use large language models to generate code. Sometimes the code is good. Sometimes its not. You should probably check it before using it. But some developers just YOLO it straight to production.

But here’s the real issue…

[…] The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code. If the understanding of the code was in one developer’s head, and that person has since left, the code is dangerous and best left untouched.

This, as you can imagine, is a maintenance nightmare. That’s where I’ve seen the real cost of abstractions. Abstractions often really do speed up production, but you pay the price in maintenance later on. If you want to understand the codebase, you must first understand the abstractions used in the codebase. That’s a lot to document, and let’s face it, documentation is the first casuality of almost every project.