> I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions.
I'm incentivised to use abstractions that are harder to learn, but execute faster or more safely once compiled. E.g. more Rust, Lean.
> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.
LLMs benefit from abstractions the same way as we do.
LLMs currently copy our approaches to solving problems and copy all the problems those approaches bring.
Letting LLMs skip all the abstractions is about as likely to succeed as genetic programming is efficient.
For example, writing more vanilla JS instead of React, you're just reinventing the necessary abstractions more verbosely and with a higher risk of duplicate code or mismatching abstractions.
In a recent interview with Bret Weinstein, a former professor of evolutionary biology, he proposed that one property of evolution that makes the story of one species evolving into another more likely is that it's not just random permutations of single genes; it's also permutations to counter variables encoded as telomeres and possibly microsatellites.
https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/the-joe-rogan-experience/24...
Bret compares this to flipping random bits in a program to make it work better vs. tweaking variables randomly in a high-level language. Mutating parameters at a high-level for something that already works is more likely to result in something else that works than mutating parameters at a low level.
So I believe LLMs benefit from high abstractions, like us.
We just need good ones; and good ones for us might not be the same as good ones for LLMs.