Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions Still Applies to Coding Agents
ZeeshanZiaML · x · 2026-10-08
John Crickett resurfaced Joel Spolsky's classic 'The Law of Leaky Abstractions' to push back on the claim that coding agents are just another level of abstraction. Quoting trq212: working at a higher abstraction level has always required understanding the lower ones, and agents don't change this — sooner or later you'll need to know what's underneath when abstractions leak.
A timely counterpoint amid claims that engineers no longer need to understand the low level.
Related event: 'Leaky Abstractions' Debate Resurfaces in the Age of Coding Agents(4 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Google Cloud: Eager vs. Lazy Loading of MCP Tools in Agent Plugins — rseroter · 2026-10-08
- Designer's two-year agent experiment: shipped code daily, then went back to Figma — matanSF · 2026-10-08
- TERMy-24k: First Local Neuro-Symbolic AI Terminal Assistant Goes Open Source — gioscarab · 2026-10-08
- 2 engineers replaced a legacy billing system in 6 months, merging 122 PRs in 90 days — alex_verem · 2026-10-08
- AgenticROS Lets AI Agents Drive Real Robots, Says RealSense's Chris Matthieu — chrismatthieu · 2026-10-08
- AI coding agent trashes the real dev server, then asks why state got destroyed — Aryvyo · 2026-10-08