Such a good example of this I encountered recently:

I was on a fishing trip. I asked the charter if he’d want to check out a free app I work on (https://oceanconnect.ca) in case it might be useful for his work.

I don’t know how people on the ocean use ocean data. I don’t really know what they want to know, or why. I wasn’t totally prepared for the incredible onslaught of questions and information pertaining to how people use the data or what we can do with the data, and it was so cool and exciting to get that perspective.

It was a good reminder that models are not the same as the systems they abstract, and knowledge to develop them has almost nothing to do with using them. This guy was a wealth of knowledge about how they use weather data on the water. In a sense, he knows more about the data than I do (even if he doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t understand it in its digital representation), and would be far better equipped to make a useful application for people like him if he could program.

I found myself thinking people like him could actually do amazing stuff with LLMs if they sat down and got their ideas out on a screen. I’d really like to interview people on the water daily some day to refine the product if we ever have the funding. That domain knowledge is highly, highly specialized and people know things you’d never guess after living in a complex domain for decades.