Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Domain expertise has always been the real moat

brethorsting.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 592 posts

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#391

Post by wiseowise »

svara wrote: post #279
zarzavat wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry this is looking at where the ball is now instead of where it's going. The recent disproof of an Erdos conjecture should put to rest the idea that LLMs will reach a skill ceiling before they reach superintelligence. I believe we are headed for a world of superintelligent AI where LLMs are much better at logical thinking than humans, the same way that chess engines are much better at chess than humans. In that…

Chess and proofs only work as comparisons to the extent that you can find parts of your job that share their key property: A solution is sought to a problem that can be stated with relatively little information. What prompt would someone have used to get a superhuman coding agent to output the Linux kernel or GTA5? Before you accuse me of moving the goalposts, that's not my point: The examples are there to help think…

You don't understand, Claude 69 will be able to one-shot GTA6. You NEED to buy into the fearmongering and anxiety.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#392

Post by wiseowise »

chasd00 wrote: post #186
dominotw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable. it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.

Working in silos like this has always been an anti pattern though. You end up being employed for 10 years but only have 1 year of actual development experience. Just turning-the-crank and going home was always risky because one day you get laid off and realize you’re 10 years behind the competition.

As opposed to what? You seriously think that shipping 10 years, instead of turning-the-crank and going home, will save you from the interviewing gauntlet?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#393

Post by dfunckt »

bawis wrote: post #343
dfunckt wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, plus you now have a new superpower with AI — the ability to dig into and ramp up expertise in mostly any domain. I’d say the article gets it backwards.

Expertise is largely tacit knowledge, reading AI slop isn't expertise.

You can quickly get the "lay of the land" and discover primary sources which you can study. Learning from the AI, I agree, is rife with landmines.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#394

Post by wiseowise »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #204
dominotw wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable. it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.

> developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction This describes the expectation my managers had of me at every software job I've had, and I've been doing this for a decade and a half It's definitely not a new thing since LLMs came around, if that is what you were implying

> It's definitely not a new thing since LLMs came around, if that is what you were implying

It is on a scale that it is required now. Previously you could say "it'll take me a week to decipher the mess", now they can just say "can't you use an agent to make it fast?".

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#395

Post by wiseowise »

deadbabe wrote: post #222
simonw wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An idea that's beginning to solidify for me is that AI tools make software development harder . It's harder because they dramatically raise the bar for what's possible to do. An individual developer can take on significantly more challenging projects now, because the ultimate constraint has always been time and AI can help you get more done in the time available. But the stuff you can get done with that time is a who…

You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on…

> You are not steering development anymore.

This hasn't been the case for at least a decade. Long before LLMs.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#396

Post by wiseowise »

derwiki wrote: post #225
deadbabe wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will never beat the vibe coders. The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck. They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded. When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on…

Who approved the vibe coders’ PRs?

Another vibe coder and Claude?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#397

Post by xorcist »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #309

While I agree that domain expertise has always been a moat, I believe the author is missing something critical: there is a big difference between being able to verify the output of a system is correct, and being able to tell a system how to generate the correct output to begin with. Personal example: I had a software engineering colleague who was the best coder of financial management systems I've ever encountered. H…

Anybody who has ever done programming professionally in the small scale knows this. Refining the requirements is the job.

In fact, I've never known an industry so keen on levelling its own moats as the software industry. We regularly invent things like 4GL, graphical programming and frameworks and engines such as Unity just to enable more people to do programming. People will happily teach programming for free in outreach programs (I am just one example). No other profession does this. Perhaps with the exception of mathematicians and other fields that are very close to programming.

I could teach an economist enough programming in a weeks that they could write an ERP module, but I could not learn enough economics in a week to write one. If the language was the barrier, we could invent a more effective one. We invent new languages weekly anyway. Having seen how quickly beginners can make things with Unity or Godot, I seriously doubt an LLM agent could improve much on this. Of course, if the job is writing yet another CRUD React app with a Java or Python backend, then sure, the LLM will be very effective. But compared to doing same app in something like Excel or MS Access? Not that much.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#398

Post by eithed »

Sure, producing code has become cheap. Yet again the taste matters and LLMs do not have taste - they will apply patterns that are unnecessary or not extendible, producing unmaintainable systems that nobody understands. Capturing domain knowledge was the crux of development process, but so was verifying, documenting, ensuring that multiple systems work together, maintaining uniformity. I don't know where the assumptions, done by developers, that they only need to produce code that just works or goes brrr fast comes from.

Domain expert can develop working code, but they will not be able to ensure above.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#399

Post by classified »

alephnerd wrote: post #300
elendilm wrote: post #285

"So the most valuable person in this new world is the one who has both skills because they can verify at both layers. They know the generated code is sound and they know the answers it produces are true." This has always been true since the dawn of programming.

Yes, but most people (especially a large portion on HN and Reddit) do not internalize it. A SWE who has always worked in DevTooling companies will always be preferred by DevTooling companies over a generalist. A SWE who has always worked in AdTech will always be preferred by AdTech companies over a generalist. etc etc. Software fundamentals - though useful - are table stakes skills at this point. No business wants to…

> No business wants to deal with the headache of on-ramping employees who have never worked in a specific domain or industry…

The usual sickness. If you don’t train people to become specialists and just expect them to fall from the sky, it’s only a question of time until you run out of specialists.

Post reply on HN