Working at a more concrete level is generally more effort and gives you greater flexibility than working in the abstract. There’s a tradeoff here, and the righ

Working at a more concrete level is generally more effort and gives you greater flexibility than working in the abstract. There’s a tradeoff here, and the right answer will be different for every person, domain, and stage of development. The heuristic I use personally is that I shift to a more concrete perspective when I’m having trouble understanding something and to a more abstract perspective when things feel tedious. I used tool-assisted incorrectly as a proxy for this scale. There are tools to help provide a more detailed, concrete view in addition to tools that speed up repetitive tasks. There is some evidence that assistive tools may impede learning, particularly regarding navigation with GPS vs a paper map. If you just want to get the job done, tools are great. If you’re going to be doing similar jobs frequently, it’s probably worth investing the effort to try the lower-level/older method a few times; it’ll make you better at using the more modern methods. It seems that going more than about 2 levels of abstraction away from my original problem gives too little return for the effort, though— Diving into the debouncing circuitry of my keyboard is unlikely to help me diagnose a syntax error. For learning, I’ll stick to paper and pencil, personally. I could never get my head around double-entry bookkeeping until I started keeping my personal accounts in a paper ledger book. I wouldn’t hire a professional accountant doing things that way, though: I now understand what the tools are doing well enough to appreciate both the benefits and drawbacks. Similarly, spaced repetition systems like Anki never really clicked for me. It only started to work when I made a physical Leitner box and wrote out cards by hand. I eventually moved to a hybrid system where I computer-generate most of the cards but still print them out and review with physical cards. The extra flexibility of the concrete system let me try thing and figure out what I needed to make a system that works for me; I doubt it’s right for anyone else, but that doesn’t matter.