This is a useful insight, but I think that many automations really are based on solid, honest-to-goodness abstractions of the same type you would find in math.

This is a useful insight, but I think that many automations really are based on solid, honest-to-goodness abstractions of the same type you would find in math. Furthermore, that's good and important! It's true that a compiler is merely translating a high-level language into the actual machine code, but it's simultaneously true that you can (generally) talk sensibly about the high-level language, and maybe even prove theorems about it, without making any reference to how it will be realized on the machine. That's a good abstraction. The better your abstractions, the more your automations make sense, and the more you can reason about them. Automation without abstraction gives you biology, which is a gnarly mess of accidental complexity that's very difficult to reason about and control. That said, I'm going to start thinking of my code more in terms of creating efficient and low-risk automation, and less about creating nice abstractions.