Software people tend to overestimate their knowledge of other disciplines, writing it off as "easy" or work beneath them. Being overpaid compared to your peers certainly doesn't help dispel this feeling. Some people have built entire careers around designing wire looms.
A professional scientist I know (tenured, professor) recruited me to set up a backtesting framework for a predictive finance model. When the results were not as they expected (this person does not work in finance and never has), they asked to see the code, then told me that claude had found a problem with the way some of the calculations were done (there was actually no problem), supplied the claude comments, and told me to change the code to match what they thought was correct. I did it anyway. Had they had more expertise in the domain (finance), they likely would have been able to leverage claude as a tool rather than inadvertently pursuing a very stupid mistake. Domain experts tend to doubt their ability to excel in other domains which is amplified by LLMs.
This sounds rather similar to the form of scientific fraud where you first create a conclusion, then invent/manipulate the data until it supports your conclusion.
They suddenly act as if Claude has awarded them with a second PhD in CS. Now they know everything and everything you tell them gets filtered through Claude.
It's like "software dude thinks he can do hardware", but on steroids. They don't know what they don't know and they think they have a panacea in their hands.
Don't you know? Software is beneath them and the fiddly bits are just standing in the way of them getting their BigImportantWork™ done.
Consider whether this is an uncharitable comment --- someone with little expertise in a discipline has made a rookie mistake and didn't realize that the wires weren't produced individually.
Professionals overestimating their knowledge is a very common thing!
Try working on a software project as a non-developer and see if you still respond so negatively to their sentiment. I can’t tell you how many times developers tried to arrogantly and dismissively explain design principles to me, as an experienced, degree-holding designer, because they skimmed a whole Tufte book at some point.
I was a developer for a decade before I went to school for design, so I’ve seen it from the other side. It’s not all bad: that overconfidence can lead people to tackle problems they’d abandon if they really understood the domain’s complexities. But often it presents like developers acting like their genius developer brain allows them to solve difficult problems in completely different fields with a few glib analogies and a few brief thought experiments.
