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Comment by woodydesign | Hacker News Reader

Great article. The part that stood out to me is the shift in how organizations define work.

In the old model, performance and OKRs were anchored in disciplines, job titles, and role-specific expectations. In the AI era, those boundaries are starting to collapse. The deeper issue is psychological and organizational: people are constantly negotiating the line between “this is my job” and “this is not my responsibility.”

That creates a key adoption problem: what is the upside of being visibly recognized as an expert AI user? If people learn that I can do faster, better, and more cross-functional work, why would I reveal that unless the company also creates a clear system for recognition, compensation, or career growth?

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Eventually whoever is responsible to fix prod incidents and maintain has the ownership. And I agree that’s pretty messy in a world where agents are crossing those boundaries. Will the AI engineer with their horde of agents be responsible to keep everything running? I really doubt so, but we will see

> whoever is responsible to fix prod incidents and maintain has the ownership.

There's a mistaken assumption under there that businesses can identify who that statement describes.

Some can. But a lot of businesses cannot identify and reward, or support, or just not RIF, those people. Like a lot a lot. More than I'm comfortable lumping under statements like "well those are just bad places to work/places that should be shut down".

There's no punchline or counterproposal there; that's just my observation.

Well, that's fine until your teammate does all of those things by default and gaps show up between them and the rest of the team.

If they create a system to compensate expert AI users wouldn't that career have a problem in that anyone (enticed by the new careers existence and) integrating their advice on any company particulars with a (weeks) more modern approach is basically putting them in the role of domain expert being eliminated.

The part I push back on is the idea that expertise is easy to learn in just a few weeks.

Take Andrej Karpathy as an example. Even if I knew exactly what tools he uses and what his workflow looks like, I still would not be able to produce anything close to what he can produce in a few weeks. And he is not standing still either—he is evolving at the same time.

A lot of real expertise is not in the visible/system-able workflow. It is in someone’s experience, taste, judgment, and wisdom. You can copy the artifact, but you cannot easily copy the thinking behind it: the principles, the decision-making, and the ability to apply those principles across many different/subtle situations.

But I do agree with the concern behind the argument. People may worry that sharing what they know could weaken their own position. And the more uncomfortable question is about peers: if someone’s role can be “retired” because others absorbed their knowledge and skills, then it is hard not to ask, “Am I next?”

Sure but here you are not talking about the 100000+ local firm experts for windows networking or coding with agents you are talking about the people who can rewrite the best advice that makes those local experts out of date where their small experiences probably don't make up for not having integrated X, Y or Z yet.

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