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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

#371

Post by oldsecondhand »

esikich wrote: post #339
runeks wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's easy to make a chessbot that only makes valid moves. Making a chessbot that plays optimally is hard.

But OP wasn't talking about solving optimalization problems, but understanding the rules of a business domain.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#372

Post by JodieBenitez »

necovek wrote: post #358
JodieBenitez wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but who said that ?

I'll be explicit: Claude is just another tool in your SW engineer's belt. If you believe Claude makes you a good engineer and you previously weren't, I am saying that's not true and you still are not a good engineer even with the latest-and-greatest Claude model. The difference is between "helps" (in your comment) or "you are". Sure, it helps a good engineer do more, do better, etc — but the thread was on being a goo…

I was a "good" (whatever that means !) SW engineer long before Claudex. At least good enough that both users and bosses had nothing but praises. And I always took my job and the needs of the users seriously.

It's "just another tool", sure. But one that is so powerful that some things that used to take a day now take minutes, or ones that used to take a week now take a day. And I get even more praises now, along with more time to focus on understanding the needs and controlling quality. For me it's not really about stuffing as much features as possible, but providing better software.

I'm glad this happened after 25 years in my career. I believe I'm in a privileged position where I can benefit from LLMs and still have the knowledge to effectively correct the machine or go back to "manual mode" if anything goes wrong.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#373

Post by wiseowise »

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,…

Grifters are trying to get their 5 minutes of fame by posting some unhinged shower thought that they have. It's just that you're noticing it now, because it pops up in the feed. Previously they'd say some shit about Agile, OOP/Functional programming or some other bullshit, and it would be swept under the rug.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#374

Post by wiseowise »

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…

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job

I'm not worried about non-technical vibe coders taking my job. I'm worried about psychotic VCs and CEOs putting me on the street in the name of "optimization" of "lower value human capital".

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#375

Post by formerly_proven »

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…

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory as a causative agent behind the paradox.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#376

Post by wiseowise »

batshit_beaver wrote: post #268
ElProlactin wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shri…

> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking. That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022. It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless c…

> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.

Do you take into account recent layoffs of Meta (8k people), Block (4k people) and others?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#377

Post by xlii »

I disagree.

Having worked across many disjunctive domains the value of "expert in domain" is greatly exaggerated. It's not like search engine doesn't exist nor that it cannot be easily absorbed. Quite often becoming expert is as simple as careful reading API documentation for existing, same domain system.

The piece is heavily one sided and don't recognize the problem of low reliability software: e.g. imagine a software designed in a way that it keeps critical piece of data as a global static variable. This will always work for a single user but will leak with two. Make it semi-critical and e.g. a part of profile loading.

Just as non-expert cannot verify if result is correct from a domain perspective, expert in domain cannot verify the output based on the basic principles (data security, safety, isolation, persistence, etc.) or even know that monetary values shouldn't be kept in floats.

Nothing like article claim had changed outside of a false promise of being productive.

Software engineers without domain expertise can fake it with unreliable results and experts without swe skills can fake it with unreliable results.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#378

Post by codesnik »

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…

I had the same problem in air travel industry. Our ticketing officers were never able to communicate how the ticket commission rules from our partners should be interpreted. I ended up adding a test framework, that allowed to add examples and counterexamples of existing flights to each rule, to verify that they are applied the way they'd assign commission by hand.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#379

Post by derfurth »

Dansvidania wrote: post #353
derfurth wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you give an example (even if contrived) of how that would have looked ? I’m very curious !

I had the experts write markdown files that contained the rules looked somewhat like:

## 1A Rule name

Some prose explaining the rules liking to official documentation.

``` if municipality and inhabitants > 10000 then functionA else functionB ```

Then a trivial parser would extract the rules, the DSL was then handled by Lark[1]. So pretty simple, but it made collaborating with experts easier as simulated results would also output some markdown they could read.

1. https://lark-parser.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#380

Post by uldos »

Although the idea of the main promise of the article is correct - that teaching domain expert to use AI seems to be faster than teaching senior developer the domain, there is and will be a learning curve to learn AI. It still sounds like this article is trying to sell vibe coding in a fancy wording. However, domain expert working in team with senior developer that utilizes AI will be the ultimate combo.
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