I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

That whole section on abstraction is completely relatable and I was in the trades. Trying to learn how to be an electrician in automation was such an uphill challenge when everything was rushing head first into plug and play.

It feels like the layers of abstraction keep building. That each layer has specialists that only knows their specific layer and that the communication between each layer barely exists.

It’s hard for me not to feel like this is all by unintentional design, like an extension of authoritarian power. Taking advantage of the lack of communication between each abstraction layer to confuse everyone while pushing for a new abstraction layer.

The problem I believe I’m seeing is that the initial layers that were first abstracted away are starting to age and break while barely getting noticed. No repairs, no maintenance, no monitoring. Nothing. The higher levels of abstraction are running on their own momentum completely unaware that the current situation is dangerously fragile.

“The bigger the are, the harder they fall” and the tower built on abstraction is scary tall.