alt Hacker NewsLLMs routinely fail at our business specifics: Local tax regulations, particularities of the accounting process, specifics of our ledger implementations.
This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that. Ofc often senior sws are expert in it, but they aren't necessary.
Traditionally its been useful for frictionless production to have engineers to be able to do maybe 90% of their work without consulting the business experts but this is the whole crux of the moment TFA discusses - "tradition" is over.
In this new world its now the job of a senior engineer not to have this domain expertise themselves, but to know how to ensure the agents have it, or can acquire it and it be verifiably correct.
Senior engineers who hang on to the idea that their advanced business domain expertise makes them safe will soon be as dead in the water as juniors who haven't pivoted.
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>This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that. Ofc often senior sws are expert in it, but they aren't necessary.
Our engineers frequently need to be on the loop with product and stakeholders: Due to real world messiness, many times the only true answer to "how does this currently work" is in the code. Enabling product and stakeholders to fetch that knowledge would be a giant time saver, so we've experimented with LLMs.
I recommend you try this exercise: place a non technical person in front of a complex business' codebase with an agent in between and get them to extract or shape business knowledge through it.
I'm serious, it's not a rethorical device, genuinely do try with a coworker or a friend. It will teach you a lot seeing how the way they approach the problem is different to yours.
All our attempts failed miserably.
> This is domain expertise - software engineers are not needed for that.
I want to work with the business domain experts you work with. The ones I’ve worked with are experts in their domain, not modeling that domain in software.
Left to their own devices with Claude Code, they produce some great POCs. Then those POCs buckle under their own weight they pile on contradicting requirements and have opus spinning to fix bugs.
Maybe the models will get good enough to solve for this, but they’re not there yet.