There’s a thing I’m whispering to myself constantly as I work on software: “if I had something that would make this easy, what would it look like?”

I do this continuously, whether I’m working in C++ or Python. Although the author was talking about Lisp here, the approach should be applied to any language. Split the problem up into an abstraction that makes it look easy. Then dive in and make that abstraction, and ask yourself again what you’d need to make this level easy, and repeat.

Sometimes it takes a lot of work to make some of those parts look and be easy.

In the end, the whole thing looks easy, and your reward is someone auditing the code and saying that you work on a code base of moderate complexity and they’re not sure if you’re capable enough to do anything that isn’t simple. But that’s the way it is sometimes.

(It's a classic legend. There is an Islamic legend that Allah gave the first pair of tongs to the first blacksmith because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs. There's a Nordic legend that Thor made the first tongs. In reality, somebody probably used a bent piece of green wood, which didn't last long, but could be easily replaced.)

His piece "Vibe Coding, Final Word"[1] is relevant right now.

[1] https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word....

Lisp, Jazz, Aikido and (now) Blacksmithing.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...

The root object would be two rocks brought together in a bang heard 'round the world, then perhaps some sharpened sticks, all the way up to a Colchester lathe somewhere in Victorian England and the machinery that made whatever object we're looking at.