Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
I think you're making my point though, all of those connections required "knowing a guy", and the odds that for all the problems you might need expertise for, you won't know enough guys.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
Opus 5 specifically seems to be affected by a severe case of turbo-encabulationitis, almost as if it was trained to spit out as complex of sentences as it can.
And may your deity of choice help you if you decide to venture on subjects which you don't have a deep understanding of, as half the sentences it generates will be (barely) cohesive.
> almost as if it was trained to spit out as complex of sentences as it can.
It probably was, at least inadvertently.
Very easy to imagine that one of the post-training step (RLHF, DPO etc) reinforced the "sounds clever" behaviour.
I knew which car it was instantly based on the headline - I go back and forth on whether to get one or to continue to abuse my 2000s Matrix manual which is like the GRC's puny brother.
reply