I’m not exactly 50-50 on this, but fairly close. It depends! People talk about ‘premature abstraction’ as if spending any time abstracting up front is premature

I’m not exactly 50-50 on this, but fairly close. It depends! People talk about ‘premature abstraction’ as if spending any time abstracting up front is premature; others talk about abstractions they find generally useful in such an abstract way that it’s easy to mistake those general findings for rules. There’s a distinct set of skills and instincts involved in recognizing a generalization of a problem, and a narrower one in recognizing matching solutions which are actually suited to the specific problem. It’s not a skill/instinct everyone has, but it’s not one that should be immediately dismissed either. And one’s recognition of both can grow and be refined over time. I also think this kind of balanced flexibility should be something we demand as a baseline assumption of the craft: - We’re going to have instincts no matter what, and we should be encouraged to explore them - Some of those instincts will prove right, some wrong; often “wrong” will be grey and murky and temporally separated from trying - When we’ve recognized the error, we should allocate time to correct it with what we’ve learned - As this process recurses, we should assess whether our predictive senses are getting closer to reality, and adjust our risk impulse accordingly