That $500 million dollar bill says otherwise.
Domain Expertise Has Always Been the Real Moat
Submitted 3 days ago by cm0002@libretechni.ca to programming@programming.dev
https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2026/05/domain-expertise-has-always-been-the-real-moat/
mabeledo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The corollary to this is that code will generally become of lower quality, as more seniors burn out from taking on purely reviewer roles.
I find myself frequently giving up on writing specs or skills for LLMs because even the most expensive and advanced models cannot produce production quality code. They can sometimes produce correct code, when multiple passes are done and the most egregious mistakes are ironed out, but at that point I’ve already burned $200 worth of tokens.
To the author’s point, if I need to make my specs so fine grained that I could write the code instead, what’s the benefit in relying on a LLM?
cschreib@programming.dev 2 days ago
You end up with a nice spec that you wouldn’t have had otherwise? That has value even if you discard all the LLM-generated code.
I think experienced engineers are able to go straight from a vague requirement to an implementation without that intermediate step, and that power is easy to abuse. We build an implicit spec on our head, which gets translated to code on the fly, and then gets forgotten.
Not defending the LLM technology, but i do think this is one of the upside.
mabeledo@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Specs are great for short term discussions about requisites and implementation.
But there’s this old adage, “Confluence is where knowledge goes to die”. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a company where this wasn’t true.
If you write a spec, there’s a non zero chance that nobody will update it in a year, because it has no effect to the bottom line, and engineers have to be willing to look them up every time they make changes to code, which is never the case.