Comment by sublinear
4 hours ago
> Most computer programmers gave up complete control some time ago when they stopped writing in machine language and let assemblers, compilers, and interpreters worry about all the little details.
Ah, there it is. The slippery slope that has stubbornly refused to be slippery for many decades now. Perhaps the author is completely misunderstanding these "metaphors".
What do you mean? With so many average users hopping onboard the LLM train to do what they could basically already do but with less effort (and less control), it seems like the slope's been slippery as predicted.
(And even setting AI aside, I think many people would agree that e.g. Windows 11 gives them less "control" than versions of Windows from decades ago, with the advantage of being harder to break in some ways. Same on the Mac side, and even in the GNU/Linux ecosystem in some ways.)
Abstractions don't give up control. They remove options.
In the best cases, those options were redundant or irrelevant to your goals anyway (compilers most of the time).
In most cases, they add mild inefficiencies (OSes, libraries, frameworks, build tools, etc. and sometimes the compiler).
In the cases of LLMs, WYSIWYG, low-code, etc. you're straight up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and setting the house on fire while you're at it too. Such is impatience and greed.
This distinction between control over the outcome and the available options is no longer as subtle as it once was in the bad old days when everyone was more naive. It is genuinely interesting. I'm not wanting to be negative for the sake of it. I actually think we've had glimpses of more reasonable compromises in the highly constrained by committee environments of app/web dev.
There is a degree to which you can retain control with those higher-level abstractions, but it tends to be just as much or more work to maintain the illusion for their less experienced end users. You end up with more scaffolding than building. This is ultimately why we hire devs anyway and abandon those tools.