Comment by ThrowawayR2 a day ago
Moving up abstraction layers really only succeeds with a solid working knowledge of the lower layers. Otherwise, you're just flying blind, operating on faith. A common source of bugs is precisely a result of developers failing to understand the limits of the abstractions they are using.
So we can all only succeed if we know how CPUs handle individual instructions?
I'm not sure whether I agree with GP, but I think you may be misinterpreting their point. I can have an understanding of CPUs in general without knowing individual instructions, and I do think knowing about things like CPU cache is useful even when writing e.g. Python.
Sure, but the comment being worried about a lack of “flexing your muscles” is perfectly countered by moving up an abstraction layer then, as you don’t have to constantly get into the weeds of coding to maintain an understanding _in general_ without knowing individual instructions.
I see what you’re getting at and it makes sense.
Goes to the larger idea that strategic and logic is important for scalability and long term success. Not just execution. Something LLMs miss often (mostly because people fail to communicate it to them).
There's generally a pretty quick falloff of how much help knowledge of each layer under you generally provides as you go deeper.
That being said, if you're writing in C, having a pretty good idea of how a cpu generally executes instructions is pretty key to success I'd say.
Agreed, also depends on the scale you are working at.
If you are a tiny startup, the marginal gains from these optimizations matter a lot less than if you are Netflix.
We only need to do that when it’s practical for the task at hand. Some tasks are life-and-death, but many have much lower stakes.