Stephan Schmidt - October 12, 2025
AI Knows Everything, But Not What You Know
Deep Knowledge vs. Broad Knowledge: Where Humans Shine, Where AIs Rule
TL;DR: AIs excel at broad knowledge (zip codes, VAT rules, common edge cases) while humans possess deep domain-specific expertise about their company's code and processes. Protect this competitive advantage by not training AI models on your proprietary knowledge—it's the one thing they can't scrape from the web.
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.
About me: Hey, I'm Stephan, I help CTOs with Coaching, with 40+ years of software development and 25+ years of engineering management experience. I've coached and mentored 80+ CTOs and founders. I've founded 3 startups. 1 nice exit. I help CTOs and engineering leaders grow, scale their teams, gain clarity, lead with confidence and navigate the challenges of fast-growing companies.
