The New Edge Isn’t Coding. It’s Domain Mastery.
And that is good news!
I detested programming in college (what we called it back then), and one of the greatest perks to graduating was that I’d no longer need to code. But when I re-entered the workforce in 2007-ish my greatest fear was that without coding skills I’d never get ahead. It was what everyone was talking about at the time. And I was mortified I’d be a dinosaur in short order.
To prevent this fate visiting my kids, I signed them up for Kahn Academy to learn Java Script and HTML language classes. I did not want them to end up like me – jobless and useless in a future where coding would be everything.
But my fears were unfounded. The smart ones built LLMs. Turns out 19 years of domain knowledge is the secret weapon I didn’t know I was building. The LLM is only as powerful as the person directing it. The best programmer isn’t the best coder anymore. It’s the subject matter expert.
Systems thinking and subject matter expertise. That’s all you need to write code now. The best coding tool isn’t a language. It’s a person who understands the problem deeply enough to know what to build.
I’m thinking about this because this past Tuesday I participated in my first official hackathon. Gathered together by KP Reddy and his team with the Zero RFI team and the engineers too, to support, I was in a room with about 40 VPs, owners, owners’ reps, and many interesting folks from the AEC community. None of us attendees were developers in any traditional sense.
But by the end of the day, each of the 6 groups assembled had developed multiple solutions to very real problems we all face every day in our work. My table created a working tool that ingested a 503-page project spec and extracted 142 submittal items across 114 articles into a clean, downloadable CSV. There are companies charging for exactly that service.
We built it in a few hours. Without engaging real programmers.
Back when I was panicking about a coding-filled future, the gatekeeping wasn’t neutral. The act of writing software selected for a specific cognitive style and called that selection intelligence. A lot of people who’d been thinking deeply about real problems for decades got told they weren’t useful in the new economy.
LLMs have changed who gets to be useful. The moat didn’t just move. It democratized. And the people who benefit most are the ones who’d been doing the deep thinking the whole time without the entry credential. That’s most of us in AEC and building products.
A week earlier, I’d been in Dallas at Advancing Construction Safety Leadership. Shane Harris was on stage. An electrician with almost 50 years in the trade he is using AI to keep his crews safe on job sites. He is not a software person. He is a field guy who saw an obvious application, cared deeply enough to solve it, and gathered a team to help him build it.
He knew the problem, knew the stakes, and knew exactly where AI could help. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the thesis.
If your VP is telling you my people aren’t ready for AI, Shane Harris is the answer. This is for everyone.