[CopyOnWrite]

IMHO there are a lot of problems with the advice from Eskil.

His ideas about abstraction of the platform made a lot of sense in the past decades, but IMHO are not that applicable nowadays: It is well understood to separate domain logic from UI and storage, and a desktop application has a very different UI from a mobile app or even a web app.

My next critic point is, that Eskil assumes all domain knowledge is there from the beginning and will not change over time (his idea of having perfect APIs from the beginning).

No mention about error handling, reliability, response times, atomic operations etc.

To make it very clear: I believe Eskil gives his advice in good faith and his advice served him well in his own projects. In my opinion most of his advice is just not good advice in general.

(Besides having modules as black box building blocks if possible).

[grumpy_coder]

Yeah, I think the first mistake is thinking 'large software project' is specific enough to have any good advice at all.

Large software projects could include AAA console videogame, or banking mobile app, or embedded vehicle entertainment system, or airport baggage handling system, or hundreds of other totally different domains.

The only good advice I can think of is given a large software project try to hire someone (or a whole team) that have built something pretty similar before.