Overlap AI With Your Area of Expertise

🔐 “Experts have many advantages. They are better able to see through LLM errors and hallucinations; they are better judges of AI output in their area of interest; they are better able to instruct the AI to do the required job; and they have the opportunity for more trial and error. That lets them unlock the latent expertise within LLMs in ways that others could not.” – Ethan Mollick

Hello Reader,

At last night’s Christchurch AI Meetup, we demonstrated how the barrier is collapsing between someone having an idea and building something useful.

Greg Dickson demonstrated how to vibe code an app with Manus, and with just a few prompts, he created a dashboard for managing YouTube complicated YouTube workflows.

It wasn’t technical skill that enabled him to create an app so quickly. He overlapped AI with his area of expertise.

*Your advantage is in the overlap of AI with your expertise.*

The people who have achieved exponential gains with AI, they are the ones who found a unique advantage. They could use AI to get the first 80% of a project done quickly, like anybody else. But by applying their area of expertise, they knew how to finish the last 20%.

When it was my turn to speak, I asked the audience to brainstorm a fictional name for a coffee shop (Has Beans). I made a logo with Gemini, and made a menu in a spreadsheet with Claude, and then asked my OpenClaw agent to vibe code a website.

I’ve made plenty of websites before, so I knew the two important variables: a logo and a menu. I could apply my expertise to improve this website, but as a one-shot product, it’s not too bad.

Whenever I find myself doing really good work with an AI agent or an LLM, it’s usually because I am operating in the overlap illustrated above. Wherever AI intersects with your expertise – start playing with that advantage.

The rest of my talk focused on the short history of vibe coding, Claude Skills, the accidental leak of Claude’s codebase, and what we learned from it.

You can watch the recording of our event below, or read an AI-generated recap based on the transcript.