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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

#331

Post by baxtr »

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…

Some companies use product managers for this purpose. They translate the implicit domain knowledge of those experts into explicit requirements, mostly through interviewing.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#332

Post by Toutouxc »

esikich wrote: post #43

My friend is an electrical engineer and just passed a FIDE chess rating of 2000. Has played for 30 years, started the chess club in high school. Knows a little programming from the stuff he had to do with microcontrollers in college. I'm an infra/admin jack of all trades with a comp sci degree and have been a hobby programmer for 30 years. I have a Lichess rating of 1000 on a good day. We tried doing a chess bot comp…

I think this might be one of the worse examples of the dynamic, for the reasons already mentioned by others (programming a chess bot is really more of a programming exercise than a chess exercise), but it’s food for thought, so thanks for posting it. Some IRL domains are definitely more chess-y than others.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#333

Post by RussianCow »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #36

Such a good example of this I encountered recently: I was on a fishing trip. I asked the charter if he’d want to check out a free app I work on ( https://oceanconnect.ca ) in case it might be useful for his work. I don’t know how people on the ocean use ocean data. I don’t really know what they want to know, or why. I wasn’t totally prepared for the incredible onslaught of questions and information pertaining to how…

Product management is its own skill, and few true domain expects have it. Without some form of PM, the resulting software will end up a mess due to poor UX, too much bloat, etc.

I think AI is going to force most software engineers to pick up this skill in some form. Building is easy; knowing what to build is the hard part.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#334

Post by konschubert »

I think this misses something.

AI is going to struggle at building a consistent internal model of the domain into the software unless you’re able to give a structured explanation of the domain.

If you’re just giving it a set of inputs and expected outputs, it’s not going to generalise well and fail at out of sample input, unless the AI already understands the domain from its training set.

Being able to give a structured explanation of a domain (and being able to judge if the internal model of the software makes sense) is not the same as having experience in a domain.

Lots of ppl with domain experience can tell a right output from a false one, but can’t tell you why.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#335

Post by elendilm »

runeks wrote: post #319
elendilm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me. What has domain got to do with efficiency and scalability. Efficiency is about using minimum cpu cycles or minimum memory or minimum network round trip or more generically using minimum/optimum resources to get something done. Scalability is about minimizing bottlenecks and linear scaling so one can just copy and execute by adding more nodes/resources and expect correctness and increased throughpu…

> Efficiency is about using minimum cpu cycles or minimum memory or minimum network round trip or more generically using minimum/optimum resources to get something done. No profitable business wants to pay you for writing code that uses "a minimum" of a resource. It wants to pay you to find the right balance between resource usage, time-to-market, operating cost, code complexity and probably several other factors.

I run a small profitable business. I avoid those who doesn't care about efficiency or scalability like the plague. Laziness shouldn't be promoted.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#336

Post by elendilm »

Toutouxc wrote: post #328
elendilm wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding me. What has domain got to do with efficiency and scalability. Efficiency is about using minimum cpu cycles or minimum memory or minimum network round trip or more generically using minimum/optimum resources to get something done. Scalability is about minimizing bottlenecks and linear scaling so one can just copy and execute by adding more nodes/resources and expect correctness and increased throughpu…

> Scalability is about minimizing bottlenecks and linear scaling so one can just copy and execute by adding more nodes/resources and expect correctness and increased throughput. Yes, technically, but note that this entire thing can be anything from crucial to completely worthless depending on the domain. You need insane scalability for a social network or a streaming service, you don’t need any real scalability for (…

Writing scalable and efficient programs are extremely hard. This matters for serious projects but for small projects, honestly who cares.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#337

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

vmurthy wrote: post #324
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…

>One of the things he told me, and that I also observed, was that the vast majority of financial experts (basically, the people in the accounting department of companies) had an extremely difficult time just telling him what the rules of any particular transaction should be We have internalized more knowledge than we can explain sounds like the textbook definition of Polanyi's paradox:"Polanyi's paradox, named in hon…

Thanks so much! I hadn't heard of Polanyi's paradox before but it is exactly what I was talking about. The Wikipedia entry even highlights the problem for AI-driven development:

> Polanyi's paradox has been widely considered to identify a major obstacle in the fields of AI and automation, since programming an automated task or system is difficult unless a complete and fully specific description of the procedure is available.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#338

Post by dannersy »

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,…

Hype folks need to move those goal posts to justify all the money and time invested into something we are starting to realize is a liability.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#339

Post by esikich »

runeks wrote: post #320
esikich wrote: post #43

My friend is an electrical engineer and just passed a FIDE chess rating of 2000. Has played for 30 years, started the chess club in high school. Knows a little programming from the stuff he had to do with microcontrollers in college. I'm an infra/admin jack of all trades with a comp sci degree and have been a hobby programmer for 30 years. I have a Lichess rating of 1000 on a good day. We tried doing a chess bot comp…

Writing software for which a full spec is available before you begin — in this case the rules of chess — was an easy problem even before AI.

There's no chess spec, it's not "solved" like it's just a matter of implementation. Chess bot programming wouldn't be a thing otherwise. I think it's really quite funny that you think this super complicated game is just some trivial programming problem. Try it.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#340

Post by marbro »

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…

This is the exasperating part about learning to speak Spanish using a textbook; you must guess the grammar rules because the textbook won't tell you. So, you use the English rule and hope and pray that it is the same in Spanish, and you'll be right the majority of the time but often wrong. Spanish textbooks written 100 years ago tell you the grammar rules and are more useful than recent textbooks.
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