This results in some of the implementation details becoming exposed or 'leaking' through the abstraction, forcing users to have knowledge of these underlying complexities to effectively use or troubleshoot the system.
These leaks can lead to performance issues, unexpected behavior, and increased cognitive load on software developers, who are forced to understand both the abstraction and the underlying details it was meant to hide.
Each abstraction tries to hide complexity, letting a developer write software that "handles" the many variations of modern computing.
However, this law claims that developers of reliable software must learn the abstraction's underlying details anyway.
Spolsky's article cites many examples of leaky abstractions that create problems for software development: In 2020, Massachusetts Institute of Technology computing science teaching staff Anish, Jose, and Jon argued that the command line interface for git is a leaky abstraction, in which the underlying "beautiful design" of the git data model needs to be understood for effective usage of git.