I Just Realized Why Everyone's an Expert Now
I Just Realized Why Everyone's an Expert Now
Ask anyone a technical question today and they will give you a confident, well-structured answer. Not because they know the answer, but because their AI tool does. The bar for sounding like an expert has dropped to zero.
This is expert inflation, and it cuts both ways.
The Upside
Beginners can now produce expert-level output for routine tasks. A junior developer can write production-quality code. A new marketer can write copy that sounds like a decade of experience. The floor has been raised dramatically, and that is genuinely good for productivity.
People who previously could not participate in technical discussions now can. Knowledge that used to require years of experience is accessible instantly. The democratization is real.
The Downside
When everyone sounds like an expert, identifying actual experts becomes much harder. The signal that used to separate experienced practitioners from beginners - the quality of their output - is now indistinguishable at the surface level.
This creates a trust problem. When you hire a consultant, evaluate a vendor, or follow technical advice, you used to be able to assess competence from their work. Now you need to assess something deeper: whether they understand why their AI-generated answer is correct, and whether they can handle the edge cases where the AI gets it wrong.
What Still Separates Real Expertise
The gap shows up when things go wrong. An AI-assisted beginner can produce perfect output for the 80% case. A genuine expert handles the 20% where the standard approach fails. They know which corners the AI cuts, which assumptions it makes, and when those assumptions break.
Domain knowledge is not just about knowing answers. It is about knowing which questions to ask.
Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.