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

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#121

Post by 2fff » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #102

xnx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall I agree with this, though I do think that there will be a trend to hoard/keep-secret domain knowledge by professions. Like plumbers will try and make it a trade-secret or protected intellectual property how to change a pipe fitting.

For basic residential plumbing work the moat is not knowledge. There are already books and YouTube videos that will teach you everything you need to know. Professional plumbers can't stop that. The real moat is that most people don't have time, don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands. For new construction and commercial work the moat is a contractor's license. They don't allow LLMs to take…

"Professional plumbers can't stop that. The real moat is that most people don't have time, don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands."

"don't want to buy tools, and don't want to get shit on their hands"

Thats closer to the truth. The rest of your post is fluff. Its pure economics, not rocket science.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#122

Post by slashdave » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:42 PM UTC

toastmaster11 wrote: post #62

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…

> nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level?

I appreciate the frustration, but some of us are actually successfully using these tools.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#123

Post by spkm » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:42 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #112

toastmaster11 wrote: post #62

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…

So far AI has been a (genuinely) massive improvement for... Search It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did, and it's got (some) understanding of how close the result (or fragments of results) are to what I want. I can ask it about things I know about, and it can answer with strategies I hadn't thought of. HOWEVER - I still need to understand the results AND AI can overr…

Thank you! That's exactly what it is. Instead of presenting you 1000 results (or 0) which you have to manually skim through, it generates 1 result as a summary. And even if there is no actual search result, it will hallucinate you 1 result (full of BS).

But because the result sounds right (and in cases with good data it actually is) people tend to trust it. I do not dismiss the potential, but for me the line is crossed when you take the result for granted without verifying and while I'm sure many here think that is implied, I bet you, at large, it is not and will be even less so in the future.

Brave New World!

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#124

Post by bigballsbjorn » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:44 PM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #112

toastmaster11 wrote: post #62

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…

So far AI has been a (genuinely) massive improvement for... Search It's reading my requests more clearly than (for example) Google's search input ever did, and it's got (some) understanding of how close the result (or fragments of results) are to what I want. I can ask it about things I know about, and it can answer with strategies I hadn't thought of. HOWEVER - I still need to understand the results AND AI can overr…

[dead]

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#125

Post by gedy » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:48 PM UTC

toastmaster11 wrote: post #62

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…

I think what matters is.... the person being intelligent. I do not mean this as an us vs them thing, but a LOT of companies have some not very smart people in and running them. It's never about exact skills or roles.

My observation on AI is that some frankly less intelligent folks think they don't need smart people any more because AI makes them smarter. I disagree.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#126

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:49 PM UTC

> A logistics dispatcher, a clinical coder, an actuary. [...] They know the correct outputs for a given set of inputs because they’ve spent ten years living in those inputs and outputs. Hand them an agent and they are startlingly effective, because the thing they’re missing, the ability to produce code, is exactly the thing the agent supplies. What they bring is the thing the agent can’t: the ground truth.

With my sincere apologies to the author if I'm wrong, I'm pretty darn sure this was written by AI.

Guys, c'mon. I don't get it. It's one thing to have an AI write code for you, because code is ultimately functional. At least in the general case, the primary purpose isn't to express an idea.

Prose is different. Your writing represents what you think. You are your writing. Why would you outsource that?

I don't get it! Unless you're a (cheating) student, or you're writing marketing drivel.... what is the point? Just don't write the blog post. It's okay. Telling the robot to write the blog post doesn't accomplish anything. I don't care what a robot thinks!

I'm sorry, I'm just getting really tired of AI generated articles on Hacker News. Please, please don't outsource your own speech.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#127

Post by gwbas1c » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:50 PM UTC

> Agentic tools collapsed one of those paths and not the other. The engineer’s advantage, the ability to translate a domain model into working code, is now cheap. The domain expert’s advantage, knowing what right looks like, is not.

Not yet.

We won't be there until AI is more like a virtual person, where the domain expert trains the AI in a similar manner to training a real person.

At this point, agentic coding only eliminates the engineer when creating very simple applications. Once the application gets complex, either the domain expert needs to become an engineer, or an engineer is needed.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#128

Post by simonw » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:51 PM UTC

toastmaster11 wrote: post #62

How much pontificating needs to be done before people acknowledge nobody has any idea what to do with AI on an individual level? First being good developer and learning how to use AI was sufficient, next it was being able to design architecture, then it was “taste” that made all the difference and now being an expert in the domain is the only thing that matters really. Until AI is basically in a stable, predictable,…

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 whole lot harder. You have to understand lots more things, and get radically outside your pre-AI comfort zone.

It used to be acceptable to spend several days refactoring a codebase, or figuring out how to ship a small feature because it's in a part of the system you hadn't worked in before or involved learning a new library in order to build it.

Coding agents mean you can climb those curves a whole lot faster, but you still need to climb them - and the volume of information coming your way is much higher.

If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#129

Post by Syntaf » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:51 PM UTC

It was never about the code.

After spending the last 5 years building software for venture capital and private equity, this blog post really resonates with me. Writing code is by and far the _easiest_ part of my job; understanding the financial engineering and nuance behind what my company's customers need from us the tough part.

We always joke that we'd rather hire a senior fund accountants and teach them to program if we could, only problem is there just aren't any of these folks around. Teaching an engineer to understand the minutia of fund accounting well enough to build software for these firms is tough.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#130

Post by 4fff » Sat, May 30, 2026, 11:52 PM UTC

threethirtytwo wrote: post #26

suncemoje wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d go with physical therapy! Or something else that’s closer to humans and health. “Problem solving” becomes that much more tangible and directly meaningful to another person

chatgpt can already do a big part of this job since most of the "therapy" needs to be self directed. So consult the AI and have it tell you what you need to do.

You cannot be serious surely?

Why do you think people get trained by a PT in person? Its not simply training - it actually goes well beyond into the realm of 'wellness'. man you are a certified bozo.