publish: true gemini: true tags:

• software_engineering
• physics created: ‘2026-05-04 14:40’ last_modified: ‘2026-05-04 14:40:00’ status: evergreen confidence: fact

Abstractions leak at their boundaries

No software abstraction is perfect; eventually, the underlying implementation details (memory, network latency) will surface and cause issues. At the absolute bottom of the stack, Physics provides the ultimate hard constraints on engineering.¹

Footnotes

1. Spolsky, J. (2002). The Law of Leaky Abstractions. ↩