A few hot takes for the #vibecoding era:

Getting overwhelmed by emails is easy; millions are sent every second. They swim in the air around your phone, waiting to be let in; they’re in the wires in your walls; undersea cables are flooded with them. The world-spanning network of machine-to-machine systems that allows you to receive autopay notifications for stuff you forgot you signed up for is complicated, but the piece of software known as “Outlook” makes it so that when you look at your computer, you just see emails. That list of emails is an “abstraction,” which means “a version of something that’s simplified to make it easier to fit in people’s brains.”

You can think of emails as electronic signals propagating over cables (which is a low level of abstraction, of which I have very little understanding), as TCP traffic between machines using specific ports and mail transfer protocols (which is a slightly higher level of abstraction that I mostly get), or you can think of it as a bunch of new posts from Substack and Patreon, requests to donate to political campaigns, and alerts about outages from hosting providers (which is a quite high level of abstraction that I can easily use to understand my email inbox right now.)

There’s a strong tendency among a certain type of person to think of low levels of abstraction as “how things really work.” And this produces tension when combined with another fact: companies are mostly led by people operating at very high levels of abstraction.

Linus Torvalds is the legendary creator of the version control system “Git” and the kernel for the operating system “Linux,” which between them are used to develop approximately 125% of all software. He also gets mad on the Internet a lot. There’s a subreddit dedicated to his outbursts. He produces headlines like “Linus Torvalds on why he isn’t nice: ‘I don’t care about you’”. His feedback is often along the lines of:

So this patch is utter and absolute garbage, and should be shot in the head and buried very very deep. Please immediately delete it from the whole internet.

Or:

“Steven, stop making things more complicated than they need to be… You copied that function without understanding why it does what it does, and as a result your code IS GARBAGE. AGAIN.”