Layer 8

I have been involved in growing engineers.

One conclusion holds. The curious ones grow. Some people accept things as they are. Others refuse to move on until they understand the mechanism underneath. The latter make better engineers.

But modern engineering has abstracted itself too far. The destination of curiosity has drifted too far. L7 does not cover it anymore. Frameworks, transpilers, container orchestration. There is no official definition, but we might as well call it L8.

More abstraction layers mean a wider gap from the concrete world. No junior today has reason to memorize ICMP packet headers. A working app materializes before the question arises. The spark of curiosity may exist, but the fuel is too far away.

Until now, curiosity alone was enough. The urge to peek below the current layer quietly built a sense of the whole system.

Then AI started writing the code, and the absence of that whole-system sense became visible. Output changes depending on how you ask. Without knowing what happens beneath the abstraction, you keep issuing misguided instructions.

The staircase we once descended out of curiosity must now be descended out of necessity. But a brain that has tasted the instant reward of a working app at L8 will refuse to walk a long staircase with no visible payoff.