Zak's Law of Skill Half-Life and Why Your Next Framework Won't Save You

Abhishek's tweet caught my eye: "Learning C/C++ will do more for your career than any other language... You'll pick up ANY language blazingly fast." Deep Thrill quoted him, mentioning finishing a PhD in 3 years building everything in C++. "Python is laughably easy" after that foundation.

I found myself typing a reply before my coffee kicked in (and ended up writing what you're reading):

"The lower the abstraction, the higher the half-life of your skills."

Hit send. Went back to debugging some React component that would be deprecated by dinner. Then stopped—wait, is this actually a law?

Sometime in my thirteenth year of building education technology, watching that same JavaScript framework rise from the dead only to shamble toward obsolescence six months later, the pattern fully crystallized. Not just for code, but for everything. Let me show you why this matters more than ever as AI compresses every abstraction layer we've carefully built.

When Bedrock Becomes Quicksand

Last week, a junior engineer asked me why they should bother learning memory management when Rust handles it automatically and AI writes the Rust anyway. I told them about my friend who learned COBOL in 1975. Still employable. Still debugging the same banking systems. Meanwhile, I've watched entire ecosystems — Flash, Silverlight (SILVERLIGHT!!! The horror...), CoffeeScript — bloom and die like desert flowers after rain.

The uncomfortable truth: every abstraction we create is future food for AI. React components? Copilot writes those. Database schemas? ChatGPT suggests better ones. API integrations? That's Tuesday's snack for GPT-5.

But someone still needs to understand why the kernel panics at random times.

Testing the Law Across Domains

Like any good law, this one should work everywhere. Let's stress-test it:

Medicine: Anatomists from the 1500s would recognize most of what we teach today. The physician who memorized this year's treatment protocol? Their knowledge expires with the next clinical trial. AI already reads X-rays better than radiologists, but it can't tell you why a patient's story doesn't match their symptoms.

Music: Bach's counterpoint rules still work. Your Ableton Live template from 2020? Already incompatible. The producer who understands harmonics will outlast the one who just presets their way through tracks.

Finance: Luca Pacioli's double-entry bookkeeping has survived since 1494. Your fintech app's UI paradigm won't survive the next design sprint. The accountant who grasps why books must balance will adapt; the one who just knows QuickBooks won't.

Agriculture: Farmers who understand nitrogen cycles and mycorrhizal networks will thrive. Farmers who only know how to operate John Deere's latest GPS system are one software update from confusion.

Pattern emerging yet?

AI: The Great Abstraction Compressor

What makes this moment different isn't that abstractions are dying — they've always been mortal. It's the acceleration. AI isn't just automating tasks; it's collapsing entire layers of human expertise into prompts.

Remember when "full-stack developer" meant something? Now it means "person who asks Claude nicely." The abstraction layer that took you three years to master becomes a checkbox in someone's AI workflow.

But watch what happens at the edges: new low-levels emerge. Prompt engineering becomes the assembly language of AI. Attention mechanisms become the new memory management. Multi-agent orchestration becomes the new distributed systems.

The layers don't disappear — they sink deeper. Today's complexity becomes tomorrow's primitive.

The Recursive Twist Nobody Sees Coming

And this is where it gets philosophically delicious, where code meets consciousness in ways that would make both Turing and Rumi smile...

As AI compresses each abstraction layer, we don't just move to lower levels — we discover the floor itself is falling. It's turtles all the way down, except the turtles are also sinking.

Consider: Assembly language was once the lowest level. Then microcode. Then quantum states. Each time we thought we found bedrock, we discovered another basement.

The same recursion appears in consciousness. We thought neurons were fundamental. Then synapses. Then neurotransmitters. Then quantum microtubules. Every floor becomes another ceiling viewed from below.

Beyond technical skills lies a deeper question about the nature of knowledge itself in a universe where every foundation reveals another foundation beneath it.

Practical Cartography for Sinking Continents

Next 2-5 Years: If you're betting your career, bet on the plumbing (my friend JJ would disagree and say "bet on becoming a plumber"... there's some truth to that; maybe a lot of it actually...). Learn how distributed systems actually fail. Understand why GPUs go brr. Know what happens when memory leaks. These aren't just skills — they're the load-bearing walls of our entire digital reality.

In parallel domains: Doctors should study physiology, not just procedures. Musicians should learn why harmonics resonate, not just which preset sounds "fire." Teachers should understand how learning happens in brains, not just in curricula.

Next 20-50 Years: The truly durable layer isn't even technical. As AI handles more implementation, humans become the why-deciders. Ethics, meaning-making, direction-setting. The questions that have no optimal solution, only choices that reveal who we are.

The longest half-life skill? The ability to make sense when nothing makes sense. To find meaning in noise. To choose direction when all paths are possible.

The Law, Codified

So let's make it official:

Zak's Law of Skill Half-Life: The half-life of a skill is inversely proportional to its level of abstraction.

Corollaries:

1. Every abstraction layer will eventually be automated
2. New low-levels emerge as old ones are compressed
3. The deepest skills aren't technical — they're existential

Yes, there are exceptions. Cooking pasta remains stubbornly abstract yet eternal. But if you're navigating the great compression, don't bet on the exceptions.

So You Want to Survive the Compression

Stop learning frameworks. Start learning foundations.

Stop memorizing APIs. Start understanding protocols.

Stop collecting certificates. Start grasping principles.

The developers who learned C in the '80s? Still shipping code. The ones who only learned Visual Basic? They're insurance salespeople now (no shade — insurance is bedrock too; and for the sake of the story and potentially to be expanded on later, Visual Basic is how I got here in the first place...).

One last thing: even as you dig deeper, the floor keeps sinking. The only truly stable ground is the ability to keep digging. To recognize when today's foundation becomes tomorrow's abstraction. To find beauty in the endless descent.

The mountain doesn't care about the market at its base. Be the mountain. Let the markets come and go. Your roots go deeper than their noise.

And when AI eats another layer of your (and much of my) carefully acquired expertise tomorrow morning, don't despair. That's not erosion — it's excavation. Another chance to dig deeper. Another invitation to find what endures, or an opportunity to write these very words.

The question isn't whether your skills will become obsolete. They will. The question is: how deep are you willing to dig before you hit something real?

Why This Blog Rose from the Dead (A Meta-Meta-Meta Observation)

You want to know the real reason this blog came back after years of silence? It wasn't to learn new frameworks or chase AI developments. It was realizing that the law I stumbled upon in that Twitter reply applies to the blog itself.

The resurrection actually started with The Zakelfassi Experiment on Substack — "memento mori: substack edition" — where I wrote about blogs dying after two posts, while experimenting with lowercase text and endless sentences. That platform experiment lasted exactly as long as you'd expect. The irony wasn't lost on me: I'd built on someone else's abstraction layer (Substack) when the real bedrock was owning my own domain, my own words, my own weird experiments in consciousness and code.

Writing predates code by several millennia. Thinking predates writing. Consciousness examining itself through language—that's the bedrock beneath all bedrocks. While I was busy learning the next abstraction that AI would eat for breakfast, the actual durable skill was staring me in the face: the ability to transform noise into narrative, to find patterns in chaos, to make meaning when meaning itself becomes commodified.

The deeper irony cuts: "Meta" is now a corporation selling abstracted social connection, but meta-cognition (thinking about thinking, writing about consciousness, debugging our own awareness) that's the skill with infinite half-life. Every blog post becomes a deposit on the deepest beach, where the waves of technological change can't reach.

This blog exists because after a lifetime building technology, after watching a thousand frameworks bloom and die, I finally understood: the compression isn't coming for our code. It's coming for our ability to make sense. And the only defense isn't to code better—it's to think deeper, write clearer, consciousness harder (if that's even a verb).

So yeah, the question remains: how deep are you willing to dig? But maybe the real debugging isn't in our codebases anymore. Maybe it's in the stories we tell ourselves about why we code at all. This blog is my excavation tool. Each post, another layer down. Not resisting the compression—just doing reconnaissance for whatever we're becoming.

P.S. — If you're reading this in 2030 and JavaScript frameworks are still proliferating, remember: even laws have exceptions. But I bet you're not writing them by hand anymore.

Related / potentially still sitting in draft if 404 errors: MCP Protocol Wars explores how lower-level protocols outlast applications. Neon Dreams shows what happens when code itself becomes conscious. The Substrate Series digs into the layers beneath the layers.