Stephan Schmidt - October 13, 2025

AI Knows Everything, But Not What You Know

Deep Knowledge vs. Broad Knowledge: Where Humans Shine, Where AIs Rule

The biggest difference between AIs writing code and humands writing code is knowledge.

AIs have a broad knowledge, broeader than any human. The know the address structure of China and Chile, zip code formats of Australia, VAT in different countries and all the edge cases to your code.

Humans have deep knowledge. A developer knows the narrow domain of a company, but is as good as knowing all of the code, the edge cases or the broad domain knowledge of the world. We have dozens of Hacker News posts about falsehoods developers believe like “Falsehoods programmers believe about email” or “Falsehoods programmers believe about names” or “Falsehoods programmers believe about time”.

The deep knowledge is where you can shine.

Unless of course you let AIs train on your deep knowledge. AI companies want nothing more than learn about all your secrets, your special processes, you knowledge about chemical processes, all your deep knowledge only your company has. The can access all the other knowledge by scraping the web - but not the one deep in your company. Don’t squander that away.