Comment by lenerdenator

> If you’re an experienced engineer betting on where to spend the next few years, this is the bet. The mechanical skill you sweated for, turning a clear idea into clean code, has gotten dramatically less valuable. The thing that’s still scarce is a deep, verified model of some real domain. Go get one. Pick an industry, an instrument, a regulatory regime, a physical process, and learn it the way you once learned a programming language or framework. That’s the part the agent can’t do for you, and it’s the part that’s now worth the most.

I'm not sure that even that will remain as valuable or work as a viable moat.

We live in an era of corporate consolidation and absolutely, positively having to meet the revenue target. We also have invested literal trillions of dollars into the AI technologies that made the first skill the author mentions less valuable. However, the result just isn't there. Like the author says, there's a need for domain expertise.

However, you had a bunch of investors plow that trillions of dollars into the current AI boom with the understanding that they could, at the very least, take anyone and have them create what used to take an experienced software engineer, and in far less time and cost, and they invested thinking that the corporate oligopoly would deliver this. They'll now do anything to get that money back. Anything.

If that means telling the corporate oligopoly to tell customers that they need to expect less in the way of domain expertise from the models, well, they'll do that. And since there are relatively few players (the literal meaning of oligopoly) and they all have incestuous financial relationships with each other, they have incentive to hold that line as an entire industry. Development of better tools to create better domain expertise models would take even more money, which the investors don't want to provide, and, short of soaking the public investment markets, can't even find the cash for. Thus, the customer has to lower their expectations if the investors are to not lose their asses on the AI bet.

Something has to break.