No. Modern day software strives to do this, but regularly falls short. To craft the abstraction correctly, you need to understand how it is to be used—this is

No. Modern day software strives to do this, but regularly falls short. To craft the abstraction correctly, you need to understand how it is to be used—this is its “whole”. The person writing the internals of the abstraction who does not understand the whole writes the internals poorly. They create a feature that breaks expectations. They optimize a code path whose unoptimized implementation is relied on for one reason or another. The consumer of the code who does not understand the reasoning for these low level implementations starts relying on sub-behaviors that aren’t actually intended. This is why even the low level folks need to understand the (proximate, at least) whole. What you’re describing is the lazy programming strategy that is certainly easier but results in dependency stacks that are brittle. It means you can plug a junior developer in anywhere without a mentor, but it also means QA efforts are enormous or breakage frequent. In UIs, it’s how Apple can rewrite applications in a new framework and lose decades of system behaviors because no one fully understood the whole when they replaced the abstraction. Abstractions are leaky. It is in their nature. Understanding or describing how they are meant to be used makes the leakiness a little more obvious, a little easier to understand. Any given team can choose to be lazy about this of course, and will export the costs to their code’s consumers. The output of a single individual may lack this context, of course. That is why the best abstractions are often created by teams over time: it takes skill in both typing code and devising and describing architecture to create a good tool in the form of an abstraction. It takes those same skills to achieve continuity over time in maintaining a given framework, application, or other abstraction. Documentation is an assist to the tribal knowledge that helps support this continuity, and a way to export that knowledge to new people, and try to make it outlast the original designers if the abstraction.