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Domain expertise has always been the real moat

brethorsting.com

361–370 of 592 posts

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#361
There are two different type of domains to be aware of here;

1) Problem Domain Knowledge: This is what people generally mean when they say "domain expertise". This has always been and always will be the moat with/without AI. Simply because this is what understanding and modeling a problem is all about. It abstracts the key concepts/ideas and their relationships in the problem domain and builds a coherent model. This model embodies a set of functionalities with bounded scope and clear assumptions.

2) Solution Domain Knowledge: This is the implementation domain for the above problem. The model arrived at above gives the requirements which must be mapped to concepts/ideas and their relationships in the solution domain. When our implementation domain is a computer system, this takes the form of architecture, algorithms and data structures. The probability of a good solution here is directly proportional to how good a model we were able to construct in the problem domain above.

Albert Einstein;

"The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills."

"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions."

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#362

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,…

It all feels to me similar to how spectators or laypeople judge pro sports. Don’t quote me on this, just trying to make a point: They’ll say you need perfect symmetry to do well in sports, which is highly correlated to development stability in the womb; higher symmetry = perfect development. Then after some years, news will come: Bruce Lee’s one leg is shorter than the other by a significant amount, and Usain Bolt ha…

It's well established that injuries occur at much higher rates when you have asymmetries/imbalances. Not even just physical "deformities" but just when your body is shifted or twisted in some way such that you don't move with balance.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#363

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…

Having worked with domain experts I concur on the difficult time they have expressing the rules of their domains. Once I built a little domain-specific language for them, that was tested against old jobs to see if they contradicted the past; it was a nifty project and since then I am convinced that DSLs are underrated as a way to encode expertise.

Scala to the rescue, then! :)

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#365
So "the real moat" are BIs and PMs equipped with LLMs? Man will I enjoy seeing this tower of babel crashing down on some heads. Unfortunately, software has tendency to survive for a long time even the shittiest conditions. Taking into account average turnover of 2 years, we're at least 3-5 generations before it collapses, so the people who started this madness will most likely be elsewhere and won't see the reckoning.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#366

Agentic coding favors senior generalists with a broad experience in many things rather than narrow experience in one or two things. I no longer think of myself as a backed engineer. That's what I was. I can do it all now. I've been building products and doing CTO jobs for a few decades now. I'm not a specialist in all layers of the software but I know enough about all layers of the stack to be able to do things with…

> Agentic coding favors senior generalists with a broad experience in many things rather than narrow experience in one or two things.

Is it? Agents are coming for generalists first.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#367

The article says that domain expertise is more valuable now because agents can code well, but not understand the domain well. I believe there are domains that are very well encoded. The model very often can know that a shift can't be longer than 11h and if you ask an agent for scheduling software it can surprise the developer by encoding that rule. Both domain knowledge and coding skills became cheaper. It might depe…

> Highly regulated domains like finance have entire books around how they should work.

Ironically, LLMs are much better at understanding those than humans.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#368
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…

You are wrong. Writing programs (atleast efficiently) is not the easiest part. It just appears to be once you get accustomed. Domain expertise is hard but not that hard compared to the insane mental discipline required to write efficient scalable code. Domain expertise is valuable and hard but I don't get this "domain expertise is harder than disciplined coding" mentality.

> Writing programs (atleast efficiently) is not the easiest part. It just appears to be once you get accustomed.

Programming is the easiest part! (c) decade+ experienced senior developers

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#370
post #47

I recently reviewed an app built mostly with vibe coding. The owner said it was almost ready to launch and just needed a quick check. After looking through it, the database design was a mess. Some features worked, some didn’t. I explained the missing pieces and why things were breaking. Like OP said, he’s the domain expert. I used billions of tokens last month alone. The tools are getting better fast. But giving AI t…

Domain expertise combined with a QA mindset could replace SWE, but consistent QA mindset is rare

> Domain expertise combined with a QA mindset could replace SWE, but consistent QA mindset is rare

I've heard this story at least 3 times already:

- Domain expertise combined with outsource could replace expensive US SWE

- Domain expertise combined with SWE could replace QA

- Domain expertise combined with SWE could replace infra engineers

Why is everyone so preoccupied with replacing someone with someone instead of doing their fucking job?

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