Domain expertise has always been the real moat

Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by Toutouxc on Sunday May 31, 2026 @03:04AM (#48343656)

I agree with your point that people “from” the domain aren’t automatically equipped to start AI-building software in the domain, exactly because they often lack one of the most crucial software development skills — being able to (and having the desire to) describe a complex system with a finite set of deterministic rules.

But I don’t think we should be calling these people “domain experts”. I think we should reserve that name for the other group, for the people who truly and deeply understand the domain, the whys and whats and why nots.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by RussianCow on Sunday May 31, 2026 @03:13AM (#48343707)

That ship has sailed. Anyone who works in a field is now considered a domain expert (or "SME") even if they're nothing of the sort. There should ideally be another term that's a superset, but I doubt it would ever catch on.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by eloisant on Sunday May 31, 2026 @03:13AM (#48343705)

You're doing a bit of a "true Scotsman fallacy" here.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by Toutouxc on Sunday May 31, 2026 @04:42AM (#48344046)

It feels like without a bit of true Scotsmanship, the term “domain expert” doesn’t really mean anything.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by spacebacon on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:59AM (#48344720)

Sure it does, it’s just a highly contested meaning that depends on a proper contemporary interpretation if to be received as intended in this context. Context that varies domain to domain. For the domain name buyer it’s quite different than the metacognitive scholar.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by watwut on Sunday May 31, 2026 @06:49AM (#48344671)

People you say are not experts are fully capable to explain whys and whats and why nots. In more details that you can absorb.

They will do that on examples tho. They will recognize and explain every single exception they see - but they are not able to list all exceptions up front. Because, that is highly unusual task

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by xnx on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:05AM (#48344762)

Agree. If you can't explain it to someone else, you don't really understand it yourself. These people are practitioners not experts.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by RaftPeople on Sunday May 31, 2026 @12:35PM (#48347118)

> But I don’t think we should be calling these people “domain experts”. I think we should reserve that name for the other group, for the people who truly and deeply understand the domain, the whys and whats and why nots.

I've spent a lot of time in my career extracting info from the business and I think most do understand the whys/why nots but aren't practiced at organizing all of those decades of experience into a higher level abstract model that can easily be communicated.

It's typically layers and layers of information with dependencies in many directions littered with exceptions. Just like our software design+dev experience, it takes a lot of practice to try to organize all of that info into a coherent presentable model.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by dapperdrake on Sunday May 31, 2026 @12:42PM (#48347196)

Then there are almost no domain experts.

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Re:Domain expertise has always been the real moat by halfcat on Sunday May 31, 2026 @07:30PM (#48350872)

There’s at least one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Mockapetris

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