The Dynamic Between Domain Experts & Developers Has Shifted
April 11, 2025
I too have seen this. The first generation of AI-powered products (often called “AI Wrapper” apps, because they “just” are wrapped around an LLM API) were quickly brought to market by small teams of engineers, picking off the low-hanging problems. But today, I’m seeing teams of domain experts wading into the field, hiring a programmer or two to handle the implementation, while the experts themselves provide the prompts, data labeling, and evaluations.For these companies, the coding is commodified but the domain expertise is the differentiator.
Source: The Dynamic Between Domain Experts & Developers Has Shifted | Drew Breunig
Many years ago, as a software developer who used their own software extensively (Style Master, one the earliest CSS Editors if you want to know) if I had a bug that annoyed me, or a feature I felt would her I’d likely fix it or build it.
Back then, teams working on software were small, often solo devs, and often driven by an interest in or a deep knowledge of the problem space their software solved.
Now, whether it’s large applications or sites, fewer developers are experts in the domain the software they work on operates in. We are experts in developing software, which for decades has become an ever increasingly arcane and complex area of practice.
But as Drew Brunig observes here that may be changing, as LLMs transform the nature of software engineering.
What implications are there for software developers? Become a domain expert outside software? That’s one approach. Another would be to become someone adept at waking with domain experts to explore new opportunities.
To be honest the last decade of SaaS has seen few of the era defining apps like previous eras saw the spreadsheet the original spreadsheet, Photoshop, Wordprocessors. VCs seem to love investing in enterprise to do list apps judging by the ads I see on Youtube.
Dan Bricklin conceived of VisiCalc while watching a presentation at Harvard Business School while studying business finance.
Photoshop was originally developed by one person, John Knoll.
Perhaps small teams, driven by domain expertise might see the rise of a new kind of software?
