Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Domain expertise has always been the real moat

brethorsting.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 592 posts

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#81

Post by rustystump »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #68
azuanrb wrote: 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

I don’t think so. Most things are sufficiently complicated enough to require multiple domain experts working together to achieve a goal.

The dunning kruger effect is in full swing as people think AI replaces the domain expert need.

Most of the value in the expert isnt the 80% but the tail 20% or 10% where AI fails. For a one of personal app or website, 80% is plenty but only that.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#82

Post by xnx »

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,…

Overall I agree with this, though I do think that there will be a trend to hoard/keep-secret domain knowledge by professions. Like plumbers will try and make it a trade-secret or protected intellectual property how to change a pipe fitting.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#83

Post by eggplantemoji69 »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #68
azuanrb wrote: 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

Personally my ability to understand atrophies / is reduced when compared to writing code ‘myself’ rather than fully being a reviewer.

Probably similar to hand writing notes (while digesting + synthesizing and not just being a scribe) vs reading notes somebody else took.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#85

Post by Avicebron »

xnx wrote: post #82
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,…

Overall I agree with this, though I do think that there will be a trend to hoard/keep-secret domain knowledge by professions. Like plumbers will try and make it a trade-secret or protected intellectual property how to change a pipe fitting.

There is a difference between something being a hidden/gate kept trade secret and something being easier for person X to do than person Y through a combination of real world experience and practice.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#86

Post by combyn8tor »

znnajdla wrote: post #31

Not just domain expertise. The hard part has always been marketing, distribution, risk appetite, motivation, grit, and patience. There are plenty of things which are "trivial" to produce with no moat and yet are still million dollar businesses. Kebab stands. Water bottles. Barber shops. Movers.

> risk appetite, motivation, grit, and patience.

This is the moat. It was before AI and still is.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#88

Post by binary0010 »

avaer wrote: post #70

There's a lot of people agreeing and disagreeing with the article, but on what grounds? How do you know "domain expertise" is a "moat"? Vibes? Has there been ongoing, persistent attacks by AI on domain expertise where we can say the moat holds, economically speaking? So far it seems quite the opposite. So far the evidence seems to be pointing to a different adage, Sutton's Bitter Lesson, which (generalized) says to n…

You think we won't have ai sales agents that are better than humans at selling?

They are already significantly better than humans at persuasion (according to a study from Princeton).

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#89

Post by threethirtytwo »

YZF wrote: post #42
threethirtytwo wrote: post #7

“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…

Good comment but I think the timelines are not clear. Humans are an algorithm. This was true before AI. In certain domains (playing chess e.g.) machines have already surpassed humans. Humans still play chess though and chess is more popular than ever. I still drive my car and self driving cars have yet to displace human drivers. I think the sentiment on HN and other places when Google started talking self driving car…

>Good comment but I think the timelines are not clear. Humans are an algorithm. This was true before AI. In certain domains (playing chess e.g.) machines have already surpassed humans. Humans still play chess though and chess is more popular than ever.

It was always true even before AI, AI just makes it more evident since Transformers are LITERALLY an algorithm that produces content nearly identical to content humans produce.

Re: Domain expertise has always been the real moat

#90

Post by notRobot »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #68
azuanrb wrote: 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

I agree that a consistent QA mindset is rare, but I'm not sure even if present if it's enough to replace an SDE.

I very recently looked at the codebase of a vibe-coded app made by someone with domain expertise but no software dev experience.

It was very clear to me that he had described it from his POV to an AI, and the AI had implemented features in a manner that technically worked, but made future maintenance or expansion extremely tricky, which is why he was now looking for a dev.

For example, in his data schema, for every item on a menu, instead of simply having an array property like so for ingredients:

    items["latte"]["ingredients"] = ["water", "milk", "sugar", ...]
He had individual flags for every item for every possible ingredient it could have or not have:

    items["latte"]["has_milk"] = true
    items["latte"]["has_nutmeg"] = false
    items["latte"]["has_cinnamon"] = false
    items["latte"]["has_sugar"] = true
    ...
This technically worked and passed tests from his POV at an MVP level. But added a lot of complications when actually trying to build more features or when a new menu item had ingredients the founder hadn't thought to include in the schema beforehand.

I totally get how he ended up where he did though. While describing it to the AI, he probably said something like "store info on each menu item's ingredients, they might have milk or coffee or sugar", and the AI created individual flags for them and he didn't think to question it, because he didn't know what's "right" or "wrong", but then as he kept building the AI stuck with keeping individual flags instead of swapping it out with an array mechanism, and he couldn't have known the correct way to implement it.

Only a dev with experience would know how to describe the system to an AI model to get an output that works well, and how to assess the quality of its output beyond what can be assessed through the basic UI. This wasn't a QA failure, it was a design failure.

Post reply on HN