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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

#471

Post by xorcist »

DanielHB wrote: post #451
xorcist wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who has ever done programming professionally in the small scale knows this. Refining the requirements is the job. In fact, I've never known an industry so keen on levelling its own moats as the software industry. We regularly invent things like 4GL, graphical programming and frameworks and engines such as Unity just to enable more people to do programming. People will happily teach programming for free in out…

I think you are underestimating how hard it is for average joe to learn programming basics. I remember a fellow in high school that just could not accept that = in programming is assignment not an equation (like in high school math)

I'd like to believe I have an inkling, having done a fair bit of teaching.

Still, imagine how hard other skills are to acquire. How much civil engineering can you learn in two weeks? How much violin playing? But you could absolutely get basic grasps on a general purpose programming language. With something specialized like Unity or Excel you would get tons of useful output.

The hurdle around assignment operator is as old as symbolic languages. That's why legends such as Niklaus Wirth wanted to use another operator, ":=", a notation that is still being used.

Anyway, it can be a hurdle, but one I find that most people get over pretty quickly.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#472

Post by layer8 »

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…

Chess is a precisely defined mathematical problem in a fairly simple artificial world. Most domains aren’t like that.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#473

Post by emodendroket »

ElProlactin wrote: post #293
emodendroket wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anyone paying for these apps if any idiot can do it with a few prompts?

> ...if any idiot can do it with a few prompts? With all due respect, this sounds like just another version of the arrogant, scared attitude that seems to be more and more prevalent among software folks these days. Is it really hard to imagine that there are tech-savvy people who are smart and motivated but don't have training as software developers, who are now capable of using AI to build and ship things? In other…

It just feels like I’m trying to nail spaghetti to the wall talking to you because you can’t make up your mind what your argument is. Either it still requires learning and skill to do it —- in which case these are self-taught software developers, which is not a new phenomenon —- or it’s so easy now that the work is completely deskilled, in which case we shouldn’t expect anyone to be able to charge for their work for very long once everyone realizes.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#475

Post by zahlman »

> Notice which way this cuts. Pre-agent, the engineer had a path the dispatcher didn’t: they could go learn the domain. Slowly, painfully, by shadowing experts and reading specs and getting things wrong in production, they would build the mental model and then they could build the system. That path was the whole career ladder in a lot of fields. The domain expert had no equivalent path, because learning to build reliable software is years of work they were never going to do.

Okay, but I've always gravitated towards working on tools and libraries and back-end stuff; as much as possible, the domain for me is software.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#476

Post by zahlman »

xorcist wrote: post #471
DanielHB wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are underestimating how hard it is for average joe to learn programming basics. I remember a fellow in high school that just could not accept that = in programming is assignment not an equation (like in high school math)

I'd like to believe I have an inkling, having done a fair bit of teaching. Still, imagine how hard other skills are to acquire. How much civil engineering can you learn in two weeks? How much violin playing? But you could absolutely get basic grasps on a general purpose programming language. With something specialized like Unity or Excel you would get tons of useful output. The hurdle around assignment operator is as…

> The hurdle around assignment operator is as old as symbolic languages. That's why legends such as Niklaus Wirth wanted to use another operator, ":=", a notation that is still being used.

Well, sure; but more generally, the ability to accept other meanings for symbols (and keep subtly different symbols straight in one's head) is a mental skill, and individuals vary in their aptitude for it. (Presumably, this one is also relevant to natural language learning, since one must reckon e.g. with false cognates.)

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#477

Post by fernandezpablo »

Things the domain expert on the author's example cant tell (from the top of my head):

- is the app is properly deployed - how will the release cycle be - is it secure? - can we run two instances of it without messing up the orders/routes/whatever? - will we spend 5k/month in vercel if people start using it - how will we notice service degradation - if we change the data do we have downtime? how do we schedule that downtime window. - where is the code stored? can the team access it? - how are new contributors onboarded? - does the app use credentials and where to store them? - does the app manipulate or store PII? - if the user refreshes the app does it generate a duplicate order/route/whatever? - if there's an upstream service are we making sure our timeouts are properly configured? - if there's an upstream service are we making sure our connection pool is properly configured? - do we have a max connection lifetime so that middleware like AWS NAT or ALB don't leave us with dead connections in our pool?

I think that makes the point clearly. Also it may explain why software developer jobs are currently on the rise despite SWE-Bench-Pro-Ultra-Magic has been maxxed for months now.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#478

Post by andsoitis »

layer8 wrote: post #464
andsoitis wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So often times he would sit down with these accounting folks and go through lots of example transactions he came up with, and from there he essentially built up the requirements spec. Right, so the spec is derived from examples, an interactive process that doesn’t require a programmer.

Interpolating between the examples still requires understanding of the domain for the interpolation to be a sensible one. And it’s an iterative feedback process: thinking about possible interpolations leads you to cases that need clarifications from the domain experts. The domain experts won’t come up with all relevant examples by themselves, and they typically aren’t as good at thinking about interpolations like a d…

LLMs already have interactive discussions with me on the topics I engage with, including asking expansive questions, so I do not think this is beyond the realm of the technology.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#479

Post by repstosb »

DanielHB wrote: post #451
xorcist wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who has ever done programming professionally in the small scale knows this. Refining the requirements is the job. In fact, I've never known an industry so keen on levelling its own moats as the software industry. We regularly invent things like 4GL, graphical programming and frameworks and engines such as Unity just to enable more people to do programming. People will happily teach programming for free in out…

I think you are underestimating how hard it is for average joe to learn programming basics. I remember a fellow in high school that just could not accept that = in programming is assignment not an equation (like in high school math)

You went to high school with Niklaus Wirth?
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