Comment by theptip

I think this neatly captures the gap in the article; it’s thinking of domain expertise as static, rather than something that needs to be built/extracted.

It also goes the other way; A a good engineer can build experiments and discover the domain even without an oracle on the team; reading protocols or manuals or specs, for example. In other words, learn to be a domain expert themselves.

Personally I find the most efficient way to learn a concept to be building it; you are immediately faced with your blind spots. AI for sure helps improve cycle time on these discoveries if you use it that way; time writing boilerplate goes to ~zero and you can spend your time figuring out how to answer the real questions.

I do think that we as a profession need to learn new architectural and craftsmanship patterns to make it easier to learn from our code; concepts like Literate Programming which were too fussy for fast-moving teams may end up accelerating in the agentic world; I need to read a lot more code than I write now. But also things like Acceptance Test Driven Design; not new concepts, just newly increased in value.