Domain expertise has always been the real moat • Hacker News Board

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#451

Post by DanielHB » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #397

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 out…

I think you are underestimating how hard it is for average joe to learn programming basics. I remember a fellow in high school that just could not accept that = in programming is assignment not an equation (like in high school math)

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#452

Post by mejutoco » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #427

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…

WRT the native grammar, consider adjective order. Few native english speakers (me included) can off the cuff name the proper order, but everyone knows the "right" order. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...

Another one: tekamolo, for German and adverbs this time.

Temporal, kausal, Modal, Lokal

https://www.olesentuition.co.uk/single-post/tekamolo-how-to-...

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#453

Post by skydhash » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #444

skydhash wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The programmer skill is how to abstract the specs from all the examples. And then to formalize it. Actual coding is merely translation. And only beginners tend to focus on that.

Sounds very similar to what AI is good at.

May work for simple cases, but how would you come up with something like typst, or thunderbird?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#454

Post by xivzgrev » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

"the binding constraint has moved from can you build it to can you tell whether it’s right."

The company I work for is currently trying to accelerate internal AI adoption, and recently laid off people to help force it. As I've written here before, this merely pools accountability (not removing it) and things will break in unexpected ways as people are not domain experts in these new areas added to their jobs.

I wonder if we will see a large reversal in a few years, or if AI will somehow be able to fix this too

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#455

Post by Mezzie » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:32 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #432

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…

I think the answer is in the second sentence of the article. The most valuable person in this new world (using the author's own phrasing from the penultimate paragraph) is the one who is good at "building a working model of the domain in [their] head". Depending on the domain, this may either be the domain expert themselves, or someone else trained in formal logic, data structures and organizing information into cohe…

I'm this person, and I do find AI to be quite helpful, though I'm mostly just playing around at this point.

I'm the daughter and granddaughter of programmers, and I learned the basics of how to code as a kid. I'm good at it and have a knack for it, but I didn't want to do it for 8+ hours a day and then spend my nights on it as well, so I didn't pursue it as a career. I did an undergraduate degree in Linguistics, which has been really helpful for having an intuitive sense for what 'language as data' can accomplish and for a strong understanding of the difference between language as data and language as meaning. I studied formal logic systems. Then I did a graduate degree in Library Science and worked in libraries for a decade and a half.

I can organize and define systems very well, and I'm trained in how to wheedle information people don't consciously know out of them without them knowing I'm doing it. I've spent enough time around actual devs to understand where my limitations are and when to loop in someone who knows more to check my work, and when it's important for the work to be super accurate versus when I can learn by fucking around. (Front end and design? Fuck around! Database structure? Fuck around but with an exceptionally robust backup system kept outside of the AI tools' purview + don't fuck around in prod. Storing credentials and people's information? Ask someone.)

The problem companies are going to have is I'm very disinclined to work for them doing this, particularly if they want us because they think we're going to be cheaper. Most people who are in this category a.) could be devs and opted not to, and there's a reason for that and/or b.) are the children, cousins, etc. of programmers. We're not stupid: we know we're just as disposable as they're trying to make devs.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#456

Post by IX-103 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

But there's nothing stopping AI from developing domain expertise. If you fine tune a model based on the records of all previous work (effectively "shadowing" the existing workers) then it can easily learn this domain knowledge. The only difference is that AI companies have gone after programming domain knowledge first. Others will come later.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#457

Post by gota » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

thibran wrote: post #341

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…

You described reasoning by analogy, which two thirds of the population does.

Please explain explicitly what you are implying, because I don't get it

Who are the 1/3 of the population that does not reason by analogy?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#458

Post by whatisthiseven » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

ozim wrote: post #347

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.

Cannot agree. Whole TFA doesn’t take into account reason why software development was actually so valuable. Single specialist in any domain is not that valuable. You may charge $200 for hour of his time sure. But to grow company you now need N specialists. What software was doing was not making specialist obsolete replacing a specialist by encoding his knowledge - well many tried to do so but failed even in 80’s “exp…

That sounds more like the extractive setup of corporations like IBM, where return/specialist must be maximized against the number of clients that can be juggled simultaneously.

Whereas in larger technology firms, yes that happens to some degree, but only with the highest level specialists such as PEs, fellows, etc.

They are already so wildly profitable and valuable by the simple nature of computing itself: it scales second only to money with regards to compounding effects. Once you have software someone can use, it scales near infinitely to more users, thus value is extracted from the work of a single specialist for all time. No need to complicate it with trying to abstract work juniors can do (and fail) and then have seniors correct. What would they be doing in non-extractive firms?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#459

Post by hbwang2076 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

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…

Domain expertise matters more than most bootcamp grads want to hear. Knowing how to phrase a query for a specific domain is half the battle.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#460

Post by layer8 » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

throwaway2037 wrote: post #312

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…

I think that you raise some excellent points here. I want to dive deeper into what is meant by domain knowledge -- as a I see it. This phrase comes to mind: "Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach." (Google search tells me that it is frequently misattributed to Aristotle.) People who cannot clearly articulate rules for their domain only "do". However, those that can clearly articulate will "teach". Thus, I…

I largely agree, but want to note that there’s the counterpoint “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” (from George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman), which also has some nugget of truth in it.