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

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#201

Post by simonw » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

Chrisoaks wrote: post #188

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.

So what enables job security now?

Being a really good engineer - the kind of engineer you can assign a feature to and they promptly turn around a robust, maintainable, secure and well documented implementation.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#202

Post by Schnitz » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

Domain expertise has always been the path to advancement in most SWE jobs. You’ve always had to understand the domain and have judgment to not be stuck as a “code monkey” in almost every company barring the big tech outliers where you can be on a generic framework or library team.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#203

Post by NK_MAK » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:26 AM UTC

To me, the bottleneck feels like it's shifted. It's no longer 'can we build this?' but 'should we build this, and why?' Strategy might be the last thing AI can't do for us at least for now

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#204

Post by bluefirebrand » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:37 AM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #168

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…

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

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#205

Post by jazz9k » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC

theLiminator wrote: post #19

wg0 wrote: post #14

This is such a sane take. It is THE reality we have been always ignoring. Writing software has never been difficult. It is the domain that has been the issue. Always.

> Writing software has never been difficult. That's not true at all, sure CRUD might not have been that difficult, but absolutely there is extremely complicated software out there that is really difficult to write in a performant and correct manner.

"sure CRUD might not have been that difficult, but absolutely there is extremely complicated software out there that is really difficult to write in a performant and correct manner."

I was a developer for 20 years, before I pivoted to cybersecurity. My hobby projects were always more complex than the software I wrote at my day job.

The majority of software developers are writing some type of CRUD code or glue code for business processes. A small minority are writing complex code at big tech companies.

AI will most likely replace the need for many software developers.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#206

Post by defgeneric » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:48 AM UTC

This is why Google is pushing SEOs to get their clients to codify and publish their domain expertise: while it gives them a way to filter signal from noise/slop right now (supposedly helping to "improve search experiences"), it also simultaneously extracts that experience into a consumable form for later training.

They really do want to know the ins-and-outs of the HVAC service business, for example, because they hope their agents will be handling it in a few years.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#207

Post by SatvikBeri » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

consumer451 wrote: post #154

letitgo12345 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long codex sessions lead to a lot of cached token hits, esp when you resume them after a few hours.

I personally don't count cached hits as $used... Neither in my harnesses, nor in the LLM-enabled apps I create. A cached token cannot be counted 1:1 as to a non-cached token, that would be silly. Wait... when some Claude 5x/20x users say they are getting "$2000 of tokens for $100," does the 2k value include cached tokens, counted at the same $/token either way? We cannot be this dumb as a community, can we? I must be…

I'm a fairly moderate user, never hit any kind of usage limits, but I used 44 million cache create tokens and 1.5 billion cache read tokens, which ccusage estimates would have cost $990, and calculates the different categories separately.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#208

Post by stevenalowe » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:53 AM UTC

Domain knowledge is not the moat it might appear to be, especially in industries that heavily document

Using AI to more rapidly learn a domain will help in the short term

But in the long term, all moats will evaporate

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#209

Post by esikich » Sun, May 31, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

lelandfe wrote: post #176

esikich wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can say application and experience isn't domain knowledge. If it isn't, I have no idea wtf we are talking about and I'll have to accuse you of moving goalposts.

You use websites a lot. Should AI make you really good at frontend development?

Infinitely better than I was before it, yes. If not, what's the point?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#210

Post by nomel » Sun, May 31, 2026, 3:09 AM UTC

to11mtm wrote: post #146

Syntaf wrote: post #129

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…

IDK, there's a tipping point where at best domain expertise without skill leads to a LOT of tech debt. In fact about half of my career has been dealing with 'domain knowledge at least present enough to get the ticket/epic closed but leads to a lot of tech debt'. i.e. a good portion of my jobs have involved a lot of a good amount of: - Review PRs with a fine tooth comb because despite domain knowledge, people are huma…

Tech debt is what most orgs/managers ask for. If nobody is complaining, there's no problem. Nobody but you knows what's behind the scenes until they ask for something new that the tech debt makes take longer than you think it should. But they don't perceive it that way, because they're probably not software people. They just see it as a new ask that will take a bit longer than expected.

Nobody cares about quality, if they can't perceive it. They want practical results. AI will give that to them, to some degree. Most people don't see software as deterministic anyways, so sometimes not working doesn't register as the monumental, show stopping, failure that it would me or you.