[thestackfox]

I get the sentiment, but "I don’t like magic" feels like a luxury belief.

Electricity is magic. TCP is magic. Browsers are hall-of-mirrors magic. You’ll never understand 1% of what Chromium does, and yet we all ship code on top of it every day without reading the source.

Drawing the line at React or LLMs feels arbitrary. The world keeps moving up the abstraction ladder because that’s how progress works; we stand on layers we don’t fully understand so we can build the next ones. And yes LLM outputs are probabilistic, but that's how random CSS rendering bugs felt to me before React took care of them

The cost isn’t magic; the cost is using magic you don’t document or operationalize.

[dnautics]

int main() is magic (and it's a framework).

[Spivak]

When everything is magic I think we need a new definition of magic or maybe a new term to encapsulate what's being described here.

The key feature of magic is that it breaks the normal rules of the universe as you're meant to understand it. Encapsulation or abstraction therefore isn't, on its own, magical. Magic variables are magic because they break the rules of how variables normally work. Functional components/hooks are magic because they're a freaky DSL written in JS syntax where your code makes absolutely no sense taken as regular JS. Type hint and doctype based programming in Python is super magical because type hints aren't supposed to affect behavior.

[est]

> Electricity is magic. TCP is magic.

Hmm, they aren't if you have a degree.

> Browsers are hall-of-mirrors magic

More like Chromium with billions LoC of C++ is magic. I think browser shouldn't be that complex.

[t-writescode]

I took classes on how hardware works with software, and I still am blown away when I really think deeply about how on earth we can make a game render something at 200fps, even if I can derive how it should work.

It’s quite magical.

[not_kurt_godel]

> I think browser shouldn't be that complex.

how is browser formed. how curl get internent