> I have a strong suspicion that folks who have a high degree of domain expertise in a particular area will fail as software builders even in an agentic world because they will struggle to elucidate clearly the rules in their head that they've learned over years.
This is the part I disagree with.
In a non-agentic world, the expert and the programmer are two different people. If the expert finds a bug in the software, they have to describe that bug, send it over to a programmer to fix, wait for a new release and until that scenario occurs again, realize that their description was actually wrong, send a corrected description, rinse and repeat for a few iterations until the bug is finally fixed for good.
In a world of agents, the expert finds the bug, asks the agent to fix it, realizes that the fix is incorrect because of sloppy thinking, does a few iterations until the feature works correctly, and that's it. Bug fixed; with 10 minutes of work instead of a few weeks.
> realizes that the fix is incorrect because of sloppy thinking
If the domain expert doesn’t understand the generated code, they can only discover incorrect logic by specific examples (specific inputs), which is usually impossible to do exhaustively. The programmer, on the other hand, can see incorrect logic directly, generalized over all possible inputs and states. It’s the difference between testing and proving correctness.
> In a world of agents, the expert finds the bug, asks the agent to fix it, realizes that the fix is incorrect because of sloppy thinking, does a few iterations until the feature works correctly
That would require clearly (a) knowing what you want, and (b) expressing it unambiguously and in detail, including all edge cases. Essentially producing a spec.
Most people are not able to do either. Talking to an LLM does not change that.
but.. they can iterate real quick!
As long as the expert don't run of patience, he may be able to do that.
Consider finance sector -- the industry is powered by excel spreadsheets made by non-programmer having no clue how programming works.
Spreadsheet is a DSL for finance and a lot of other sectors. But the lack of formal logic capabilities shows when you seen the spreadsheet organization. Most only stand with ducktape all over the place.