Your ability to evaluate whether the argument is correct is limited. In theory, the author and the correctness of the argument are unrelated; in practice, the degree of experience the author has with the topic they’re making an argument on does indeed have some correlation with the argument and should influence the attention you give to arguments, especially counterintuitive ones.

That doesn't work for me. Knowing who is making the argument is important for understanding how credible the parts of their argument that derive from their personal experience are.

If someone anonymous says "Using coding agents carelessly produces junk results over time" that's a whole lot less interesting to me than someone with a proven track record of designing and implementing coding agents that other people extensively use.

Appeal to authority, the logical fallacy, is not attempting to claim that authority is irrelevant or has zero signal whatsoever.

Someone making an argument needs relevant experience/context to substantiate their argument. Just because the end opinion is "correct", doesn't mean they arrived there in a reasonable way.

> The argument is correct, or it isn't, no matter who said it.

Yes, but we all have insufficient intelligence and knowledge to fully evaluate all arguments in a reasonable timeframe.

Argument from authority is, indeed, a logical fallacy.

But that is not what is happening here. There is a huge difference between someone saying "Trust me, I'm an expert" and a third party saying "Oh, by the way, that guy has a metric shitton of relevant experience."

The former is used in lieu of a valid argument. The latter is used as a sanity check on all the things that you don't have time to verify yourself.