The right balance will look very different in different parts of a system. In general the lower levels of a system need to be more generic, and higher levels mo

The right balance will look very different in different parts of a system. In general the lower levels of a system need to be more generic, and higher levels more specific. One often overlooked guiding principle is that when you’re building large systems it’s important to be able to “finish” some parts of the system and be “done” with them, otherwise your mental “context window” will just grow forever until not even the brightest among us can make any progress.