Sideways, Not Up: Why AI Is Not a New Abstraction Layer (opens in new tab)

There is a popular claim that AI coding assistants are the next rung on the ladder of abstraction, sitting above high-level languages just as those languages sat above assembly. I take the strongest version of that argument seriously, then argue it does not hold. A compiler is a deterministic, specified, reproducible abstraction you can stop thinking about. An LLM is none of those things. It does not move us up the ladder so much as sideways into nondeterminism.