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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I find this take off

I find this take off. In general, LLMs collapse a bit of all knowledge work, including many domain experts. I work with domain experts often and it’s usually the most difficult part of the process. Now, I can ask an LLM the questions I need to design the system and have an agentic system help me build parts. And it works, quite well. The places it falls flat is domain expertise that isn’t well documented, like specific business processes. Knowing something will fail because X in dept A won’t like it and will undermine it (politics) or some silly process I didn’t know about forbids it. So it’s not domain expertise, it’s idiosyncratic expertise that shines these days. Knowing where things deviate from a domain or the standard and being able to adapt around that. Years ago there’s a group I worked with and I was at the mercy of about 3 people I could ask questions to in order to make sure I was doing things correctly because digging into that domain was time prohibitive. Now, I can sit down one evening and dig fairly deep into a domain. …

Original discussionDomain Expertise Has Always Been the Real Moat549 source comments · at import
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DU

How would you know the agent is correct in domain expertise if you’re not possessing domain expertise yourself?

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KA

Shallow generic domain knowledge is not really a helpful domain expertise, is it. Lets take banks - knowing how banks work in general means little for that one specific bank who is paying you, which has different portfolio than most, different processes because everything is homebrew over decades of doing business and they differentiate from rest of the market in many ways and thats their key proposition, different data infra, set of internal apps, protocols and so on. There is no general llm knowledge you can distill in few minutes that would help you much. You need to know your specific company, no way around it. In fact, to be proficient in those deliveries, you need to know those internal politics, processes, their quirks and so on, 100x more than some code fast delivery since this is majority of any bigger project. You need some reputation to get things done effectively. This, for s…

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HE

> I work with domain experts often and it’s usually the most difficult part of the process. Now, I can ask an LLM the questions And you will not notice the obvious errors in its answers to even basic questions, because you are no expert and should have really consulted with one. When talking about their own area of expertise, almost everybody immediately notices the glaring faults. But then they are very impressed and take LLMs as gospel when talking about anything else. I do not get it.

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