The ease of expertise. I recently posted a picture of potato… | by Adam Fields | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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The ease of expertise

Adam Fields

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I recently posted a picture of potato latkes I made and got one reaction that I didn’t expect — “I don’t even attempt to try making these”. That surprised me, because I consider them to be not very complicated to make — they only have a few ingredients, and the technique is not difficult. Then I started to dig into all of the things that went into that opinion, and that led down into thoughts about the nature of expertise in a much more general way.<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

The latkesThe latkes are actually really easy to make, but in making that judgement, I’m taking for granted a WHOLE bunch of things — I have a nice food processor, big pots, a lot of cooking experience, my mother’s recipe (which is pretty simple but refined over many attempts), peelers, specific experience to know they’ll come out better if I strain the batter for a few hours beforehand, a really nice fairly large capacity straining pot to do that in, large pans for frying, a bunch of big sheet pans with racks for letting them drain and crisp up after frying, more specific experience to know they’ll get crispier if I drain them on racks first instead of putting them direclty on plates lined with paper towels. Not much trouble at all really.<br>By many measures, I’m an expert home cook. I’m not a professional, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and doing about how to make things easier. I can pick up a new dish and apply all of that immediately. I am comfortable with knives, heat, and seasoning. I have a lot of equipment, if not the exact pieces I need to make most dishes then something proably very close to that. I have enough experience to know when something is going right or wrong, and course correct.<br>For all of this, a lot of the work is not around doing the work, it’s around building systems to make the actual work itself easy to do, or at the very least, easier.<br>This has some parallels in the practice of karate. We develop skills over time by repeating the basics until they are second-nature. The doing itself is what builds experience. Refinement can’t happen at the beginning, because you’re focused on what to do rather than how or why. But as you repeat the same thing over and over again, the sequences and motions become ingrained. You don’t have to think about the broad strokes anymore and you can focus on the details — what’s my other hand doing, are all of the parts of my body synchronized, am I striking with the correct part of my fist, etc… The hard stuff becomes easy, but it can’t be done without doing the work to make it easy. I do this because I want the end product, but also because I love everything about the process along the way.<br>There’s an old joke (with many variations) — a repair person is called in to fix a malfunctioning fridge. He listens to the machine and taps it once with a hammer, and says to the owner “that will be $150” The owner says “but all you did was tap it once with a hammer”, and the repair person says “oh, it’s $10 to tap with a hammer, but $140 to know where to tap”. It’s easy if you already know how (and have a hammer).<br>When I was a kid, I had a conversation with my father about how school was teaching me to think instead of memorize things and he responded that the things you memorize are the things you think with . (I didn’t remember everything, but I remembered that.) I’ve been reading a number of articles about the specific erosion of the pathways to build expertise in the age of AI — by having an agent “do the grunt work” for you, we’re hollowing out the development of expertise that turns a junior at something into a senior. The phrase “eating your seed corn” has been making the rounds. This is directly relevant here.<br>This essay wasn’t originally about AI, but I’m seeing these lessons all over the place. When you ask an AI to do something for you, you’re losing a big part of the experience that comes with understanding how the underlying system works. For years, when interviewing programmers, I used to ask one very specific question all the time, a very simple one:<br>What is 2¹¹?<br>The answer to this question gave me a very reliable predictor, at the time, of whether the person I was interviewing understood the internals of how computers worked. I’m personally not great at math, but when I was learning computer science, powers of two were drilled into everything until we breathed them. So for a programmer of that era — did they understand powers of two? Could they compute one in their head that was just slightly large enough that they probably wouldn’t know if offhand from memory? Did they have specific domain experience in something like computer graphics that would result in them knowing the answer immediately?...