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Domain expertise has always been the real moat

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Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#231

Post by PessimalDecimal »

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?

Other vibe coders?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#232

Post by hibikir »

simonw wrote: post #128
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 who…

From that perspective, development has always been harder since I started. I left college with a copy of K&R and remembering courses that applied to real life immediately, because data structures and such were just what we had. In my first job, I ended up writing a code generator to help serialize a large number of data structures, straight from a compiler design class.. which right now you don't need to know a thing about, because serialization and languages with introspection are everywhere. The knowledge you need to be a professional engineer just kept going up through the last 30 years, while most of the basics became far less relevant, because the libraries just did it.

AI raises the bar again, as its probably at least as good as me, if not better, at anything I learned in college. I've spent years living off of random trivia from the last 30 years, as I saw computing grow with me. How do you know this?! Because everything built on top of it didn't exist when I was your age, so I had to learn it! But well, nowadays the AI is better at that trivia too.

The world moves, we do what we can with what we kno. It's not just programming, but what innovation and automation has done to the vast majority of things humans have done to be productive for each other since humans are people. We'll have to cope, like the guy that bred oxes to pull the plows.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#233

Post by Terr_ »

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.

I cynically predict that some of the new practices being hyped could easily end up worse...

Before: "I learned very little this year, because I was placed in charge of the same stuff, and I've already learned most of what I could from tinkering with that code, stepping through its architecture, and dealing with those recurring problems."

Soon: "I learned very little this year, because I don't deeply interact with anything, I just pull the lever on the babbling slot-machine until I get lucky and things seems to quiet down."

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#234

Post by deadbabe »

simonw wrote: post #229
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…

That might be true in the short-term, but I'd be very surprised to see that hold for the long-term. We've had plenty of technology trends in the past that have promised faster development but has later turned out to have problems. Organizations that stick around learn lessons about what works and what doesn't. If in a year's time organizations aren't feeling severe downsides from all of the unreviewed vibe-coded junk…

The problem is downsides are random and not well understood. Sometimes by luck, an organization might not encounter any significant downsides. These kind of survivor case studies will perpetuate the myth that vibe coding is good enough.

The vibe coders aren’t “right”, they just get lucky.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#235

Post by teaearlgraycold »

simonw wrote: post #227
dogcomplex wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a roundabout way of saying it makes software development easier. Perhaps even a 180. But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.

Maybe it makes software development easier, but a career as a professional software engineer harder.

I hope that after a short period of delusional expectations and layoffs from employers we're at least left with a more consistently competent set of professionals in our industry. Some people have imposter syndrome. Others are actually just imposters.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#236

Post by deadbabe »

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?

It’s all just vibe coders high fiving each other and saying LGTM.

Here’s a secret: I haven’t really bothered reviewing any PRs since September of last year or so. I just click approve and don’t even read it. It has been way less stressful for me.

Do bugs get through? Sure. But someone will just come in and vibe it out anyway. And I have yet to see a vibe coder or anyone who approved their flawed work get any repercussions. So yea, it doesn’t matter.

No one’s going to come after you asking “why did you approve this shitty PR?” And if they do you can forward it to the author and ask why they wrote a shitty PR. But that just doesn’t happen. It doesn’t matter.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#237

Post by N_Lens »

simonw wrote: post #128
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 who…

[flagged]

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#238

Post by kuboble »

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,…

Being a domain expert has been more valuable than being an excellent software developer before the ai.

In 2018 I witnessed one guy with no prior coding experience who built a tool that after a month of coding was making very decent money (more than me), just because he was aware of a particular niche.

He showed me parts of his code and it was as bad as my first program, but his was solving a real life problem.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#239

Post by toastmaster11 »

simonw wrote: post #229
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…

That might be true in the short-term, but I'd be very surprised to see that hold for the long-term. We've had plenty of technology trends in the past that have promised faster development but has later turned out to have problems. Organizations that stick around learn lessons about what works and what doesn't. If in a year's time organizations aren't feeling severe downsides from all of the unreviewed vibe-coded junk…

If the vibe coders are right I would give at least 90% of the credit to all the well made libraries, rules, and best practices that developers have built up over the decades. That’s what is embedded into LLMs and what might be the saving grace of slop code bases in the future.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#240

Post by zarzavat »

simonw wrote: post #128
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 who…

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 world there's really nothing humans can offer in terms of logical thinking other than their humanity itself. An 8 year old with Stockfish can beat Magnus Carlsen, and an 8 year old with Codex (and daddy's credit card) will be able to beat me at software engineering.

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