Domain expertise has always been the real moat

Domain expertise is now the binding constraint in AI-assisted software development: agents can generate code but cannot verify domain correctness, so a logistics dispatcher or clinical coder who knows what valid outputs look like outperforms a generalist engineer who lacks that oracle. Pre-agent, engineers could acquire domain knowledge over time; domain experts had no equivalent path to coding ability. Agents have closed that asymmetry in one direction only, shifting the scarce resource from code production to domain ground truth.