Live data from Hacker News

Domain expertise has always been the real moat

brethorsting.com

51–60 of 592 posts

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#51
post #46
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 a charitable interpretation is that from the perspective of AI, some domains are shallow (like chess), and some are deep (you can fill in the blank here).

What would fill in the blank be? Because this was actually kind of a test for me to address the question of "does AI just amplify domain knowledge?" In this case, it seems it didn't.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#52
In the past, an engineer who deeply understood the internals of a DB and how memory management worked in Java would be indispensable.

Now these skills don't matter as much because LLM's/Cloud/Java abstract out these problems.

What makes domain expertise a different category itself that lends it to be not automated out by LLM? Example: Why can't I go to into an agri-startup and become better than anyone else by querying an LLM even when I have no domain expertise? Much the same way I beat the dev who was good at DB internals?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#53

“The hard part of writing software has never been the writing.” I’m tired of these endless articles on HN about software engineers trying to reinvent their identity while trying not to lose touch with reality. One way of dealing with LLMs is to deny the skill level of LLMs. Claim they can’t code as well as you. This excuse works to a certain extent but it also fails because not only are their multitudes of cases wher…

There's certainly a whole lot of "it was never the coding that was our value" articles about right now. I agree that they represent a degree of self delusion to an extent. But it's also a useful examination of where your value might lie in this new AI age. I think there will be a role for humans in it - where exactly it lies is obviously up in the air.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#54
Like so many posts that end up on HN, I just want to say "you've got a decent idea, but tone it the fuck down."

It's absolutely true that domain knowledge is incredibly useful, and developers aren't always great at gaining it. But there's also something about decomposing systems into their component parts, understanding algorithms, and knowing how code works that's also incredibly useful, even with agents in the picture. A really good developer needs both of those skills.

Take that example, of the generated shift that's illegal (by coincidence, I do freight optimization and work with examples like that in my day job). A domain expert will know the specific example is illegal. So they'll tell the agent to fix it. The agent will probably fix it for that case.

How does the domain expert then know that the agent has produced a thorough fix, as opposed to just that scenario? Not because the agent says so. So it is because they test it manually (but which cases)? Or because they review the strategy of the agent's tests, and know how the algorithms work, and know the edge cases that the tests need to cover? But they can't do that, by stipulation, because they're not experienced with code, they're just using the agent.

So yes, if the agent gets to the point where it can design robust software that avoids edge cases in a complex domain, doing complex operations and is thoroughly tested, and so on, then half of my skills are going to be irrelevant.

Out of the box, agents don't do that today. Perhaps they'll get to that point, but until then, your knowledge of where to put a semicolon has become less useful, but your ability to specify and test processes precisely has not.

But yeah, knowing your domain well is a damn good idea.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#55
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…

Honestly, this is my experience as well. LLMs make it easier to explore other domains, but they do not make you the master of one; you still need expert domain knowledge.

That said, they do make excellent tools to quickly try out new ideas and dive into them; they can even be great learning accelerators if you have a curious mind.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#56

This article is wrong. LLM's encode all the domain knowledge you could possibly want. As a software dev I can query an LLM, become a domain expert in a short amount of time, and then code up a solution. If people think their niche is safe from automation, think again. Even the people who think theyre the masterminds at the top. Edit: Yes "expert" was too strong a word. Proficient would be better. A lot of the barrier…

I won't over-generalize here, because maybe your statement is true in some cases, but I will provide a counterpoint: this is not true (in my experience) in real estate title insurance and escrow services. I've consulted for and led large teams for real estate title insurance and escrow companies for many years, and the domain expertise is so incredibly deep, nuanced, and multivariate (especially depending on jurisdic…

Agree with you there. What you are working on and the commenter below talking about surgery, they are all valid counter examples where the degree of expertise is quite extreme. But most people are not living on the edge of domain expertise. Im guessing 80% of the domain knowledge out there is up for grabs. For example: I dont have to go get a job at a security software company to figure out how security camera systems work and the principles involved, I can ask probing questions of an LLM and get most of it. The domain knowledge is embedded in the model.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#57
"Go get one."

Yes, and its price law all the way down to the metal, hasn't it always been?

I think this article is stating the obvious. In software, it has always been a requirement to learn the domain, and then capitalize on that in any way the software can be written (by hand, as a tech lead, or managing others, or lately, using ai).

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#58

I disagree because we're buying up companies and training models, creating skills and agentic workflows on individual domain expert's 30 years of notes and prior projects The only moat is that there is so much more work for domain experts since they and many of the bureaucratic processes in between aren't the bottleneck anymore I think it's important to be clear on what's really happening. Companies were accomplishin…

But that’s not true though. You still have to convince humans. You still have to deal with what people in power feel (clients, leads,etc) This still adds wall time. I saw 0 serious analysis confirming 5x productivity gains. In the coding part? Maybe, and that’s not even certain. But pure coding is only one order of making software, or solving problems with software

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#59
post #50
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…

what does actually playing chess have to do with writing an efficient game tree search algorithm beyond a few simple principles? You challenged him to a programming contest and won, as the vastly more experienced programmer. Even though he could use AI, your domain knowledge here proved to be the deciding factor.

I had never tried to make a chess bot before though, we both started at the same spot. There are obvious things you can search for to make one. We both had the same information there. The domain was chess, and his expertise didn't help him win. If you are a chef, shouldn't you be able to make better recipes with AI? If you are a fitness trainer, better routines? Etc? Or is AI only for programmers?

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#60
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…

Totally agree.
Post reply on HN