Abstractions vs. Substrates is a great way to understand what AI is amazing at and what it needs to deliver and be trusted in the enterprise. Adam Seligman puts it great!
Abstractions vs. Substrates: What 2025 Taught Us About AI Agents Something shifted for me and many others around Thanksgiving. Claude Code + Opus 4.5 dropped, and the discourse changed. Boris Cherny (who created Claude Code at Anthropic) posted that he didn’t open an IDE for an entire month. 259 PRs, 497 commits, 40k lines added. Every line written by the agent. Andrej Karpathy admitted he’s “never felt this much behind as a programmer” and described modern AI as “powerful alien machinery that just landed” with no manual. The vibes are real. Agents are crushing it with abstractions—web development, data integration, debugging, refactoring. They use libraries effectively, chain tools together, and build solutions that work. The leverage is transformational. But here’s what I keep coming back to as we head into 2026: **Abstractions that let agents go fast are not the same as substrates that let agents build things that are reliable.** Coding is not operating. When an agent vibe-codes a web app, it works once. Maybe. But “works once” is different from “works always.” Production requires a foundation that just works. This is why agents depend on solid substrates: **AWS** – Infrastructure battle-tested across millions of workloads. The networking works. IAM is enforceable. Monitoring is built in. **Postgres** – Decades of edge cases fixed. ACID guarantees that actually guarantee something. Data stays written even when things go wrong. **Replit** – A runtime that runs. Deployment is a button. SSL just appears. No debugging Docker configs. **Workato** – 30 years of enterprise integration patterns. Durable cursors that pick up where they left off. Job deduplication. Configurable retry logic. Everything logged for audit. The agent orchestrates across dozens of systems while the platform handles operational complexity. The pattern: when an agent builds on a solid substrate, you get something that works always, not something that works once. 2025 was the year agents learned to code at a superhuman level. 2026 is the year we find out which substrates let them actually operate. Let your agents roam free with abstractions—thousands of libraries and APIs to choose from. That’s what they’re good at. But be thoughtful about substrate choices. That’s the foundation. Get it right and your agents build things that work. Get it wrong and you drop an order, or pay an invoice twice. Abstractions let agents build fast. Substrates let what they build last.
Interesting perspective, it reminds me that real value lies in practical implementation
Seeing AI as a bridge between ideas and daily work helps businesses truly benefit
The substrate view reminds us to test AI beyond labs for real business impact
Also, AI should align with company culture to gain employee trust quickly
We also need clear metrics to gauge AI’s real world performance over time
Understanding AI's substrate helps us design tools that actually fit local workflows
Also need to think about data privacy while building AI substrates for enterprises
Makes me wonder if too many abstractions could mask bias, while a solid substrate keeps the model honest.
Cost efficiency matters too; AI should give good ROI without overcomplicating processes
The analogy nicely shows how AI must balance theory with real world reliability