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Your Career Isn't Eroding - You're Just Holding the Wrong Moat (blog.herlein.com)
submitted 1 month ago by codeinabox@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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[-] natecox@programming.dev 21 points 1 month ago

Hell, I have NO IDEA what those really mean, but it’s 3 seconds away via prompt.

This is where I stopped reading, and it's so emblematic of the argumentation I routinely see.

"I have no first hand knowledge of your domain, but let me tell you why you're wrong about it" is just a derivative of "everything I don't understand is simple", and I will have no part in that.

[-] 87Six@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I can't even tell you how many times people around me do this.

At some point x feature was requested.

First thing was an AI prompt asking how it could be done and how long it would take.

"3 days" was the response. They had never implemented that before, ever. Told the client right away.

It took around a month to get to a working state.

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 3 points 1 month ago

So someone who isn't an expert in implementing financial services isn't allowed entry into a discussion about LLMs in software develoment? Weird gate to keep, but sure.

I could see "well this doesn't apply to the financial space" as an argument, though I wouldn't really buy that in this case. But "fuck off you don't have the specific domain knowledge of this other dude" is a weird bar to set.

[-] x74sys@programming.dev 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's not gatekeeping, but okay. Gatekeeping is about withholding knowledge & information from a group of people for a personal benefit. It's not gatekeeping to stop every clueless idiot from blurting out their opinion and expecting everyone to respect it, because otherwise you're a gatekeeper (I don't want to imply the author of the article is a clueless idiot, this is a generalized statement).

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago

Gatekeep (v.):

to restrict access to (something of value, such as information, knowledge, or resources) in order to exert power or control over a person or group

The person I was responding to was restricting the author's access to the conversation by publicly refusing to engage with them over a trivial, irrelevant matter. So if that's not gatekeeping, then clearly they're calling the author a clueless idiot, which is just plain rude.

[-] x74sys@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

You have it plain sight. Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping. Your definition pretty much aligns with what I said.

And if someone doesn’t have any idea what they’re talking about, then maybe they shouldn’t take part in the talking. You can’t tell me that you‘ll take cybersecurity advice from someone who saw a movie about hacking.

Which doesn’t mean that clueless people have nothing of value to add, but it’s unlikely (especially in highly factual discussions).

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago

From the author's own website, they left AWS to join their current company as VP of Software (whatever that title means but seems obvious that it's software related). My immediate assumption would not be that this person is clueless about software development. Maybe they are, but assuming that from the start is just engaging in bad faith.

Refusing to engage with someone is not gatekeeping.

You show up to a party and talk to a group talking about using LLMs to make software to try to make friends. They look at you. You are a developer, but you don't specifically work in financial services so they just ignore you. In fact, they say out loud at the party "hey you don't know jack shit about anything because you don't work in financial services". The whole discussion they're having has nothing to do with financial services.

You don't consider that gatekeeping?

[-] x74sys@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

By definition, that in itself isn’t gatekeeping. And I personally wouldn’t feel gatekept, just excluded. In the article the author evaluates the usefulness of AI for a field which they admit to have no clue about. And it reads like that AI gives you the knowledge of that field, just 3 seconds away, and everyone is obsolete now, which isn’t true. While it can give you the knowledge, you still need the understanding, and understanding is what makes people good at something, not knowledge in itself. I don’t understand your argument. The situation you described is not what I‘ve been talking about.

  1. It‘s not about making friends
  2. It‘s about factual discussions
  3. It‘s about people trying to contribute to those discussions with arguments they can’t reason about, which normally isn’t particularly helpful, and if someone acts like a knowledgeable dick, then I don’t feel bad excluding them at all
[-] pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

But it's specific domain knowledge all the way down.

We have a special term for the few remaining generalist web developers without a domain specialization: "WordPress Admin".

(Edit: To clarify, I have mad respect for WordPress specialists. That's the joke. Even the people trying hardest to generalize become crazy levels of specialized.)

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago

This is literally the premise of the article.

The person I responded to stopped reading because the author doesn't have specific domain knowledge of financial services.

[-] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

AI is really great at giving a beginner tier understanding of something, which people then take and run with as if they are now an expert.

[-] TehPers@beehaw.org 10 points 1 month ago

There is one other thing not mentioned that LLMs are bad at: being accountable. When your customers come complaining at 2:30 in the morning that the payments are failing, your manager isn't going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he's awake after 3 hours of sleep. He's going to you to do that. And when you're able to tell him that your downstream service is having an outage because AWS shit the bed again, he's going to trust your word. Will he choose to replace you with a LLM? Maybe, but he'll never be able to put out those fires without you.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 points 1 month ago

he’ll never be able to put out those fires without you.

Why do you say that? I would guess that we are very few years away before we have AI systems monitoring for downtimes and such that can quickly diagnose and fix issues that occur completely automatically - in fact I would not be surprised if this already exists today.

[-] hazelnoot@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago

your manager isn’t going to the LLM to ask what the fuck broke and why the fuck he’s awake after 3 hours of sleep.

My manager actually does that, even for mid-day outages when the whole team is available. He just prefers to ask a chatbot instead of his own staff 🙄

[-] JakenVeina@midwest.social 9 points 1 month ago

The author may be, in theory, right, but it counts for nothing if the people in charge don't recognize where that actual value is. Which MANY of them do not.

[-] gemakey@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

Why does this read like it was written by Claude?

[-] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Because it obviously was.

The dashes, the short sentences, the bullet points, the overly familiar tone that seems LinkedIn-ish. All of it sounds like AI.

this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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