Comment by RA_Fisher
14 days ago
By moving up a level in the abstraction layer similar to moving from Assembly to C++ to Python (to LLM). There’s speed in delegation (and checking as beneficial).
14 days ago
By moving up a level in the abstraction layer similar to moving from Assembly to C++ to Python (to LLM). There’s speed in delegation (and checking as beneficial).
Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.
We only need to do that when it’s practical for the task at hand. Some tasks are life-and-death, but many have much lower stakes.
So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?
I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.
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There's generally a pretty quick falloff of how much help knowledge of each layer under you generally provides as you go deeper.
That being said, if you're writing in C, having a pretty good idea of how a cpu generally executes instructions is pretty key to success I'd say.
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