Taste Is All That's Left
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
With AI generating plausible output, taste becomes the only scarce skill in software.
The author argues that AI collapsed the cost of producing software, removing friction that once filtered out mediocrity and trained judgment. Taste-the wordless verdict that something is wrong before you can explain why-was built through living with one's own mistakes, a curriculum now skipped by those who generate fluently from day one. Because taste is slow, invisible to dashboards, and unrewarded by markets that time both the tasteful and the tasteless with the same stopwatch, the scarce act is no longer making but choosing: deciding what deserves to exist among infinite plausible output.
What commenters are saying
Commenters split on whether the essay's premise overstates AI's competence. Some agree the argument resonates, citing 'Worse Is Better' and Rich Hickey's 'simple made easy' as precedents that taste as maintainability has long been undervalued. Others counter that taste remains embedded in building the factory itself-the AI systems still require enormous engineering judgment to create and sustain. One commenter fears LLMs default to 'average taste,' suppressing novel ideas, while another counters that hackers will hack regardless, and LLMs may free them to focus on higher-level design instead.