5 ms·

It's delegation then. We can use different words if you like (and I'm not convinced that delegation isn't colloquially a form of abstraction) but you can't con

It's delegation then. We can use different words if you like (and I'm not convinced that delegation isn't colloquially a form of abstraction) but you can't control the world by controlling the categories.

robenkleene 1y ago
One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation. Managers tend to hire sub managers to manage their people. You can see this with LLM as well, people see "Oh this prompting is a lot of work, lets make the LLM prompt the LLM".
  - robenkleene 1y ago
    Note, I'm not saying there are never situations where you'd delegate something that you can do yourself (the whole concept of apprenticeship is based on doing just that). Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job. I guess I'm not 100% sure I agree with my original point though, should a programmer working on JavaScript for a website's frontend be able to implement a browser engine. Probably not, but the original point I was trying to make is I would expect a programmer working on a browser engine to be able to re-implement any abstractions that they're using in their day-to-day work if necessary.
    - meheleventyone 1y ago
      There's an interesting comparison in delegation where for example people that stop programming through delegation do lose their skills over time.
    - tguedes 1y ago
      I think what you're trying to reference is APIs or libraries, most of which I wouldn't consider abstractions. I would hope most senior front-end developers are capable of developing a date library for their use case, but in almost all cases it's better to use the built in Date class, moment, etc. But that's not an abstraction.
    - AnIrishDuck 1y ago
      The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do. Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly. That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent. For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't. > Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job. I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here. I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done. This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself. 1. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating
- vidarh 1y ago
  The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?
  - robenkleene 1y ago
    Fair point, I elaborated what I mean here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116976 To address your specific point in the same way: When we're talking about programmers using abstractions, we're usually not talking about the programming language their using, we're talking about the UI framework, networking libraries, etc... they're using. Those are the APIs their calling with their code, and those are all abstractions that are all implemented at (roughly) the same level of abstraction as the programmer's day-to-day work. I'd expect a programmer to be able to re-implement those if necessary.
  - benterix 1y ago
    > The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. The problem with this analogy is obvious when you imagine an assembler generating machine code that doesn't work half of the time and a human trying to correct that.
    - nerdsniper 1y ago
      I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      An abstraction doesn't cease to be one because it's imperfect, or even wrong.
  - 1y ago
hoppp 1y ago
Delegation of intelligence? So one party gets more stupid for the other to be smart?
- benterix 1y ago
  Except that (1) the other party doesn't become smart, (2) the one who delegates doesn't become stupid, it just loses the opportunity to become smarter when compared to a human who'd actually do the work.
  - lazystar 1y ago
    well, then it comes down to which skillset is more marketable - the delegator, or the codong language expert. customers dont care about the syntactic sugar/advanced reflection in the codebase of the product that theyre buying. if the end product of the delegator and the expert is the same, employers will go with the faster one every time.
    - ModernMech 1y ago
      That's how you end up in the Idiocracy world, where things still happen, but they are driven by ads rather than actual need, no one really understands how anything works, somehow society plods along due to momentum, but it's all shit from top to bottom and nothing is getting better. "Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!" is the end result of being lead around by marketers.
      - lazystar 1y ago
        isnt this what assembly devs would have said about c devs, and c devs abput python devs?
  - soraminazuki 1y ago
    You're in denial. (1) The other party keeps learning, (2) the article cites evidence showing that heavy AI use causes cognitive decline.
hosh 1y ago
There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate. There is another form of delegation where the work needed to be done is imposed onto another, in order to exploit and extract value. We are trying to do this with LLMs now, but we also did this during the Industrial Revolution, and before that, humanity enslaved each other to get the labor to extract value out of the land. This value extraction leads to degeneration, something that happens when living systems dies. While the Industrial Revolution afforded humanity a middle-class, and appeared to distribute the wealth that came about — resulting in better standards of living — it came along with numerous ills that as a society, we still have not really figured out. I think that, collectively, we figure that the LLMs can do the things no one wants to do, and so _everyone_ can enjoy a better standard of living. I think doing it this way, though, leads to a life without purpose or meaning. I am not at all convinced that LLMs are going to give us back that time … not unless we figure out how to develop AIs that help grow humans instead of replacing them. The following article is an example of what I mean by designing an AI that helps develop people instead of replacing them: https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/ https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards...
- salawat 1y ago
  LLM's and AI in general is just a hack to reimplement slavery with an artificial being that is denied consideration as a being. Technical chattel, if you will, and if you've been paying attention in tech circles a lot of mental energy is being funneled into keeping the egghead's attention firmly in the "we don't want something that is" direction. Investors want robots that won't/can't say no.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    What's interesting about this proposition, is that by the time you create a machine that's as capable in the way they want to replace humans, we'll have to start talking about robot personhood, because by then they will be indistinguishable from us. I don't think you can get the kinds of robots they want without also inventing the artificial equivalent of soul. So their whole moral sidestep to reimplement slavery won't even work. Enslaving sapient beings is evil whether they are made of meat or metal.

robenkleene 1y ago

One argument for abstraction being different from delegation, is when a programmer uses an abstraction, I'd expect the programmer to be able to work without the abstraction, if necessary, and also be able to build their own abstractions. I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation.

Jensson 1y ago
> I wouldn't have that expectation with delegation. Managers tend to hire sub managers to manage their people. You can see this with LLM as well, people see "Oh this prompting is a lot of work, lets make the LLM prompt the LLM".
- robenkleene 1y ago
  Note, I'm not saying there are never situations where you'd delegate something that you can do yourself (the whole concept of apprenticeship is based on doing just that). Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job. I guess I'm not 100% sure I agree with my original point though, should a programmer working on JavaScript for a website's frontend be able to implement a browser engine. Probably not, but the original point I was trying to make is I would expect a programmer working on a browser engine to be able to re-implement any abstractions that they're using in their day-to-day work if necessary.
  - meheleventyone 1y ago
    There's an interesting comparison in delegation where for example people that stop programming through delegation do lose their skills over time.
  - tguedes 1y ago
    I think what you're trying to reference is APIs or libraries, most of which I wouldn't consider abstractions. I would hope most senior front-end developers are capable of developing a date library for their use case, but in almost all cases it's better to use the built in Date class, moment, etc. But that's not an abstraction.
  - AnIrishDuck 1y ago
    The advice I've seen with delegation is the exact opposite. Specifically: you can't delegate what you can't do. Partially because of all else fails, you'll need to step in and do the thing. Partially because if you can't do it, you can't evaluate whether it's being done properly. That's not to say you need to be _as good_ at the task as the delegee, but you need to be competent. For example, this HBR article [1]. Pervasive in all advice about delegation is the assumption that you can do the task being delegated, but that you shouldn't. > Just that it's not an expectation, e.g., you don't expect a CEO to be able to do the CTO's job. I think the CEO role is actually the outlier here. I can only speak to engineering, but my understanding has always been that VPs need to be able to manage individual teams, and engineering managers need to be somewhat competent if there's some dev work that needs to be done. This only happens as necessary, and it obviously should be rare. But you get in trouble real quickly if you try to delegate things you cannot accomplish yourself. 1. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating
vidarh 1y ago
The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. Do you therefore argue programming languages aren't abstractions?
- robenkleene 1y ago
  Fair point, I elaborated what I mean here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45116976 To address your specific point in the same way: When we're talking about programmers using abstractions, we're usually not talking about the programming language their using, we're talking about the UI framework, networking libraries, etc... they're using. Those are the APIs their calling with their code, and those are all abstractions that are all implemented at (roughly) the same level of abstraction as the programmer's day-to-day work. I'd expect a programmer to be able to re-implement those if necessary.
- benterix 1y ago
  > The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on. The problem with this analogy is obvious when you imagine an assembler generating machine code that doesn't work half of the time and a human trying to correct that.
  - nerdsniper 1y ago
    I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.
  - vidarh 1y ago
    An abstraction doesn't cease to be one because it's imperfect, or even wrong.
- 1y ago

hoppp 1y ago

Delegation of intelligence? So one party gets more stupid for the other to be smart?

benterix 1y ago
Except that (1) the other party doesn't become smart, (2) the one who delegates doesn't become stupid, it just loses the opportunity to become smarter when compared to a human who'd actually do the work.
- lazystar 1y ago
  well, then it comes down to which skillset is more marketable - the delegator, or the codong language expert. customers dont care about the syntactic sugar/advanced reflection in the codebase of the product that theyre buying. if the end product of the delegator and the expert is the same, employers will go with the faster one every time.
  - ModernMech 1y ago
    That's how you end up in the Idiocracy world, where things still happen, but they are driven by ads rather than actual need, no one really understands how anything works, somehow society plods along due to momentum, but it's all shit from top to bottom and nothing is getting better. "Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!" is the end result of being lead around by marketers.
    - lazystar 1y ago
      isnt this what assembly devs would have said about c devs, and c devs abput python devs?
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  You're in denial. (1) The other party keeps learning, (2) the article cites evidence showing that heavy AI use causes cognitive decline.

hosh 1y ago

There is a form of delegation that develops the people involved, so that people can continue to contribute and grow. Each individual can contribute what is unique to them, and grow more capable as they do so. Both people, and the community of those people remain alive, lively, and continue to grow. Some people call this paradigm “regenerative”; only living systems regenerate. There is another form of delegation where the work needed to be done is imposed onto another, in order to exploit and extract value. We are trying to do this with LLMs now, but we also did this during the Industrial Revolution, and before that, humanity enslaved each other to get the labor to extract value out of the land. This value extraction leads to degeneration, something that happens when living systems dies. While the Industrial Revolution afforded humanity a middle-class, and appeared to distribute the wealth that came about — resulting in better standards of living — it came along with numerous ills that as a society, we still have not really figured out. I think that, collectively, we figure that the LLMs can do the things no one wants to do, and so _everyone_ can enjoy a better standard of living. I think doing it this way, though, leads to a life without purpose or meaning. I am not at all convinced that LLMs are going to give us back that time … not unless we figure out how to develop AIs that help grow humans instead of replacing them. The following article is an example of what I mean by designing an AI that helps develop people instead of replacing them: https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards/ https://hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-building-ai-tools-backwards...

salawat 1y ago
LLM's and AI in general is just a hack to reimplement slavery with an artificial being that is denied consideration as a being. Technical chattel, if you will, and if you've been paying attention in tech circles a lot of mental energy is being funneled into keeping the egghead's attention firmly in the "we don't want something that is" direction. Investors want robots that won't/can't say no.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  What's interesting about this proposition, is that by the time you create a machine that's as capable in the way they want to replace humans, we'll have to start talking about robot personhood, because by then they will be indistinguishable from us. I don't think you can get the kinds of robots they want without also inventing the artificial equivalent of soul. So their whole moral sidestep to reimplement slavery won't even work. Enslaving sapient beings is evil whether they are made of meat or metal.