Comment by shalmanese
2 days ago
> The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete once the agentic tools become good enough to allow domain experts to fully iterate on solutions on their own.
That’s been the argument since the 5PL movement in the 80s. What we discover is that domain expertise an articulation of domain expertise into systems are two orthogonal skills that occasionally develop in the same person but, in general, requires distinct specialization.
It never worked because a lot of times, domain experts are stuck in their ways of doing things and the real innovation came from engineers learning from domain experts but adding their technically informed insights on the recipe to create novel ways of working.
A Lotus 1-2-3 vibecoded by a Product Manager in 1979 would probably had a hotkey for a calculator.
Yes, 4GL and 5GL failed, but authoring Access applications should be a breeze now.