No Skill. No Taste

https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/

by ianbutler • 5 months ago

203 208 5 months ago

blog.kinglycrow.com

cjonas5• 5 months ago

There's been a lot of discussion around in the future how "taste" will be the only differentiation / moat (recently watched a good video about the gen-ai music industry), as everything will be trivially easy to recreate. But your vision and how well you execution it... and the nuance involved in getting every minor detail correct is much harder (and something the LLM is exactly average at). I recently experienced this while vibing the duckdb vscode extension "I always wanted". Code is 100% LLM generated, but I think I probably have well over 1000 turns of conversation at this point to make every detail exactly as I want it.

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

I don't know where this leaves us, but it's going to be interesting/scary to live through what seems to be coming.

embedding-shape6• 5 months ago

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

Why is it easy to copy?

I too have written a tiny essay on this topic (https://emsh.cat/good-taste/) but I don't see how "taste" is easy to copy, at least I haven't been convinced by any of the arguments people chucked at me so far.

cjonas5• 5 months ago

Because it's easier to clone someone else's "good taste" by just mimic'ing their formula / ripping of their exact implementation of a feature/ui. The gap between "first to get it right" and "everyone else catches up" could become non-existent in software. You'd need to continuously innovate (I think to some degree, this has always been the case, but it's the tempo that has changing).

Why is it easy to copy? I think music trends would be one historical example of this? With software it's a bit more concrete (I'll just make my app function EXACTLY like yours does) and there is less protection from the law, unless you manage to weasel your way into a patent.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

How do you define taste (rough is fine)?

markbao• 5 months ago

An intuition for what people like.

Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.

mjr00• 5 months ago

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;)

Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter.

If you actually try looking at places where people show off their taste--scrolling through the latest songs on Soundcloud being a great source--you realize that people just pump out terrible stuff without realizing it's terrible. This was true pre-AI, and AI it hasn't made it any less true.

It's similar to the transition from live instruments to the DAW in the music world. The DAW eliminated all physical training requirements for making music, and opened up massive new worlds for the types of music that could be made. The end result was a handful of great things amidst a sea of garbage.

cjonas5• 5 months ago

Just to be clear, I don't feel this is actually the case in world of music and art, at least as an individual consumer. I would argue the industry & economy rewards it though.

In software it feels different though. If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

roywiggins3• 5 months ago

Here's another thing: I think spending too much time with generative AI makes your taste worse, by habituating you to stuff that's pretty bad.

I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.

It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!

Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.

embedding-shape6• 5 months ago

You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation, and because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output

Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.

Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?

roywiggins3• 5 months ago

Darren Aronofsky

https://www.decodingeverything.com/darren-aronofsky-ai-slop-...

(Also, this website when Show HNs with slop READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese.)

altmanaltman7• 5 months ago

Kind of meaningless if you let "taste" be a vaguely-defined term. Like, what do you mean by "taste"? How is it a differentiator? Does Apple have taste? Is the reason one open source app is better than the other because the devs of the first one have more "taste"?

Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you better have that taste, aaight?" paradigm which is dangerously close to just common sense.

BoredPositron• 5 months ago

Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.

ryandrake• 5 months ago

It's kind of useless if it can't be defined. Let's say I'm a software developer, and my product is criticized for "lacking taste." What can I possibly do to correct this, if we can't even agree on a definition? Let alone agree on what actions can be taken to "add taste" to the product.

gtowey• 5 months ago

Ah yes, "if it doesn't make sense to me personally, it clearly can't exist"

altmanaltman7• 5 months ago

More like "I don't understand what you're talking about."

embedding-shape6• 5 months ago

"Others like it" could be one definition. "I like it" can be another. Personally, it kind of differs depending on what I'm doing, what exactly it means.

altmanaltman7• 5 months ago

Okay but what does it mean in the context of coding or software? Like if someone claims good taste is the differentiator fod good and bad in software, they should have some basic objective ways to measure it right? If its just vibes we're going with then everyone has subjective taste and everyone's app is good. Overall I still think its meaningless/lazy to talk about vague terms as guiding principles or key differentiators.

gopalv• 5 months ago

Like, what do you mean by "taste"?

Imagine the scene from Ratatouille, where Remy explains "taste" and the brother finds it impossible to understand what it is ("Food is food").

The dad goes from being annoyed that Remy is a picky eater instead decides to put him to work as a taster. Gives him the job of approving forage that comes into the family & protect others from being poisoned.

The reason we say "taste" is because that's the closest parallel.

When it is even more vague, I call it a "code smell".

altmanaltman7• 5 months ago

Okay but you can define what good food is, right? Like if you're the best chef in the world, you can clearly define what "taste" of a particular food is the best. It might be subjective but it wouldn't be vague, the chef can clearly pinpoint what makes the food taste better instead of just being like "its what you feel" or other vague terms. My point is that the article doesn't delve into what is good taste in the context of coding. I understand the metaphysical meaning of what taste means but you need to define what it means in your particular context. If you leave it to be subjective, then everyone has good taste which means taste cannot be the difference between good and bad software which is the premise of the post.

bandrami2• 5 months ago

Taste is a key concept in aesthetics and has had some great thinkers write about it. There's always some tension on whether taste can be taught, but I think the broad consensus is that it can but it's hard to do.

selridge18• 5 months ago

The only book worth reading about taste is Distinction. Lots of people have written about it but most spin their wheels pretending class and upbringing are not involved.

James_K2• 5 months ago

Skill is your ability to achieve your objectives, taste is the ability to differentiate good from bad objectives.

altmanaltman7• 5 months ago

Okay but how does taste let you do that? I get what skill means but what is it that lets you differentiate between good and bad objectively? Is it experience? exposure? or just having good design skills? The article would be better if it went into the crux of this issue instead of hand waving it over.

kmijyiyxfbklao• 5 months ago

It's purposefully undefined because it's a social concept, not an engineering one. And it's also subjective. You can tell because they use OpenClaw as an example of a tasteful project. I would put OpenClaw in the same category as memecoins in terms of taste. Obviously crypto can be way more harmful, but in terms of taste both are on the "internet meme" category, as helpful as OpenClaw can be.

andai3• 5 months ago

So, OpenClaw is literally a meme. It existed for months and didn't get much attention until it became a meme. And every day, you see people fell for the meme wholesale: "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw, now how do I run GPT-5 on it locally?"

The technical characteristics appear to be entirely irrelevant. (I'm not sure if taste even enters into the picture.. it appears to be a third category!)

andai3• 5 months ago

I'd say taste-as-subjective-something is largely irrelevant. If something "looks good" but hurts to use, that's not much help. If it looks like ass, but is a delight to use, that's not good either (because most people won't reach the point of actually experiencing it). So you need "looks good" and you need "actually delightful to use". Taste seems to be orthogonal to both of those. Or perhaps (two kinds of?) taste is involved in each one.

At which point we define taste as two unrelated things: skill in aesthetics, and skill in ux.

I've seen apps that looked amazing (Taste #1, aesthetics) but made me go, "Okay, did they actually try using this thing?" (Taste #2, usability). I think these tastes are completely orthogonal, from personal experience. I think the vast majority of designers suffer from Total Usability Taste Blindness.

(And, though it feels a bit mean to point out, the vast majority of FOSS suffers from a total absence of both. The winning projects only win because they have no competition, they're the only free option available.)

ossa-ma• 5 months ago

Yes, a positive from this is those with authenticity and taste will shine. Self-expression will be a form of resistance and we'll see a lot less homogenisation across things like writing, ui/ux, animation, individual websites, blogs.

Who knows maybe the old, scattered, personable, decentralised internet will come back - things like MySpace, geocities, sites like this (a lost art): https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Also taste comes from your ability to steer a model instead of having it steer you. e.g. a model suggests a basic pill button, you push back and curse it for its blandness and use it to design something new and novel.

bluefirebrand2• 5 months ago

Why would anyone bother creating or publishing anything new on the internet now that we know that AI companies are just waiting to hoover it up, without compensation, to enrich their models?

Seeing how predatory these companies are in their scraping and then continuing to publish where they can scrape is the absolute height of stupidity

sodapopcan• 5 months ago

Physical media is already making a comeback, so let's hope it does with a vengeance and with it, more and more live events.

pulvinar• 5 months ago

I'd like to see the internet return to those who aren't putting it out there for money, so AI companies (and anyone else) hoovering it up wouldn't bother them. Sharing should be the point.

Would also result in fewer sites with ads -- yay!

cgriswald2• 5 months ago

I’ll say a lot of information is cheap and what often matters is presentation. I still visit Wikipedia even though I ask LLMs things.

cgriswald2• 5 months ago

I use LLMs in my fiction writing; and before the wolves come out to shred me to pieces: The LLM never gets to see my writing and doesn't do any of the writing for me. I use LLMs in other ways.

One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my resolution is bland and at worst cliche.

vunderba5• 5 months ago

This is eerily similar to something I do with Hacker News stories that hit the front page. I run the post against a couple of LLMs (Mixtral, GPT-OSS, Qwen3, etc.) with the directive to produce a set of 20 of the most likely top-level replies.

I then wait a few days, and then use a couple of systems (embeddings, deBERTa, etc.) to rank comments by novelty against the LLM-produced replies.

mlapeter3• 5 months ago

Not sure if you'd consider this a counterpoint or just proving your point, but in the sea of AI slop there's also a real chance for people to create things that they couldn't before - my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read: https://www.kidhubb.com/play/meteor-dodge-solarscout64

It's not the prettiest but he's able to iterate on it and basically build whatever he can imagine just using claude on his ipad with voice transcription.

ForHackernews• 5 months ago

But will he learn to read?

mlapeter3• 5 months ago

It's actually helping him learn to read quite a bit - after voice transcription, he reads the post and edits any errors by tapping on the word and changing it. He's been on the cusp of reading on his own and it's the first thing that motivates him enough to do it naturally.

lelanthran3• 5 months ago

But will he learn to read?

Of course he will, just not well. The point of the GP is that he doesn't need to learn anything because the AI can understand his verbal instructions.

oytis• 5 months ago

But... why? How is prompting an LLM "nerding out"? Before it was "it's not the prettiest, but the kid did it himself", which is cool and educational and just cute. Now it's "it's not the prettiest, and also the kid didn't really do it". Why? Just what for?

mlapeter3• 5 months ago

Why did people used to make geocities pages back in the day? Kids like to express themselves and being able to make simple games and share them with friends is fun for them. So far it's helping him learn to read (he reads and edits his voice transcriptions before submitting), and teaching him basics like bugs, game mechanics, etc. He iterates on it and adds/ removes things. He probably did several dozen iterations over 2-3 hours.

Posting it publicly is also helping him learn about people - we talked about how no matter what some percent of people won't like it and may even say it's stupid, but that will always happen and it's still worth creating things anyway.

Bjartr2• 5 months ago

This is such an awesome example. That it's good enough at getting a gun game to put a smile on my face is icing on the cake. I've played lots of simple flash games in my day and this seven year old's vision made real by an AI is better than a decent number of those.

Bjartr2• 5 months ago

Which isn't diminishing the authors of that prior work either, those same individuals with these new tools would have been able to do more too.

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

When I wrote this blog post, something like this was in my mind as the type of scenario where I view it as a net positive. I don't have a problem with people building things they want for themselves, the problem starts when people try to share something to the rest of us without having understood why anyone would want to see it first.

I am extremely excited that your kid is able to do this, and even you sharing it now here isn't like "my child's game is the best game ever look at me" it's thoughtful commentary on the post I've written.

Even if you had shared a separate post on HN proper like "LLMs are enabling my child to build earlier and become involved in tech" or something that would have had thought behind it on why its interesting to other people, in considering other people you're acting in good faith.

My overall point isn't that LLMs generating apps are bad it's that we should consider why what I'm showing to someone else would matter to them in the first place, which you did here :)

lelanthran3• 5 months ago

my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read

Humans learn mastery by doing, not by watching.

I suppose it comes down to whether the most important skill for your kid is to give instructions, or whether it is to actually read and write.

For reference, my kid only just turned 6, and is at the level of reading books without pictures. I'm kinda proud that he reads better, faster and with more retention than kids aged 9, and it didn't come with the ease[1] that "nerding out" on Claude came to your kid.

The question you gotta ask yourself is this: is a skill that takes a 7 year old a day to master really going to make him more valuable than a skill that took a 6 year old 2.5 years to master?

The 6yo who can read can easily do what your kid did, but your kid can't easily do what the 6yo can.

From another PoV: how valuable of a skill do you think "prompting" is when a 7yo who hasn't mastered reading can master it?

--------------------

[1] I started a daily routine when he was 3.5 with the DISTAR alphabet. We did the routine every day, whether it was christmas, or his birthday, even on vacation. Same time, every day.

postalcoder• 5 months ago

Hmmmm, where on the taste scale would you put making text unreadable when selected?

gjvc• 5 months ago

next to dark blue text on a black background

raddan3• 5 months ago

It's funny that you say that because my course websites for my students both:

1) make it difficult to select or copy text, 2) and even if you manage it, you discover that the actual text in the webpage source is encrypted,

mainly so they don't vibe-code their homework assignments. So I guess it rates high on my taste scale.

(kidding of course; but you can always bring your own stylesheet to the party)

Xirdus• 5 months ago

I wonder how well this works for you, considering screenshots are a thing.

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

Mmmm I can see the text just fine when selecting it, I realize this is subjective to me though and an accessibility thing I likely missed, I'll look into a better color scheme for that on the blog, sorry for the trouble.

retrac98• 5 months ago

The site seems to be falling over. Is that a skill or taste issue?

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

It appears to still be up? It's also running on the server in my office lol

brador• 5 months ago

If only we had some kind of voting system that could uplift the good stuff...one can only dream...

lubesGordi• 5 months ago

I don't know man. I'm writing a flashcard app, and I like it. It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want. BC I could never get into quizlet. Whatever. Maybe others will like it, maybe not, I don't care.

Taste is subjective. Having 1 million todo apps, great. Maybe someone I know will find one they like and tell me about it. Maybe I'll find one that doesn't suck. Maybe I'll just make my own.

One thing I won't do though, is complain about how there's now 1 million todo apps that aren't up to my standards. Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful thing.

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

That's awesome! I love that energy, it's the opposite of the energy I was trying to talk about in the post actually, you're not trying to tell me why your app is the best thing in the world and spamming it everywhere when it has nothing to offer me or other people, and having not considered other people.

selridge18• 5 months ago

Why don’t you tell them that they have no taste?

Seems to be what the essay implies.

tptacek4• 5 months ago

Where by "spamming" you mean daring to post it to HN under a "Show HN" title.

bartread• 5 months ago

I can’t actually get to the article on the WiFi network I’m on but when I see “No skill. No taste.” you don’t sound like the butt of that punchline. Clearly you at least have skill, and I’m in no position to judge your taste.

The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.

OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.

moritzwarhier• 5 months ago

It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want.

(emphasis mine)

Sounds like (good) taste to me!

Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.

But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.

It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".

Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!

AntiDyatlov• 5 months ago

Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful

No. Silence is better than noise.

selridge18• 5 months ago

Then put a sock in it

benhurmarcel• 5 months ago

When somebody generates an app but doesn’t share it, does it make a noise?

vunderba5• 5 months ago

Taste is subjective.

If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.

I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.

fluoridation• 5 months ago

I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.

Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "Because most people don't like it, it shouldn't exist"?

mecsred• 5 months ago

That would honestly be an incredible performance art piece, like a distilled waste of a human life just to prove a point. Then even after all that you could ask the question "Is the art inferior, did it prove the point effectively.". I think there's a real argument to be made that it didn't, becuase just having the argument surfaces some very interesting points about worth.

wafflebot• 5 months ago

I agree! Taste is downstream of such things as design principles which can be described in objective terms.

Taste is not synonymous with personal preferences, otherwise we wouldn't describe some taste as "bad taste" or "poor taste." Rather, to me, one's taste refers to one's power of discernment as to what is good.

We can enjoy cup-of-noodles without conflating our enjoyment as being good taste. I like a lot of things that are fairly trash.

Aerroon• 5 months ago

I've done the same thing with a todo app.

I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.

I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.

m3kw94• 5 months ago

With millions of todo apps released daily, it boils down to marketing which have a taste component.

throw48472855• 5 months ago

Taste is not subjective. It's intersubjective. Subjective experiences are totally located within a particular subject. For example, "I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm sad."

Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.

According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.

selridge18• 5 months ago

I think you can lead yourself astray imagining that there’s a big difference between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. One is just a college educated term for the other.

More importantly, I think that enough time has passed that we can critique poor old Kant on this matter. When he says the taste has no interest in something what he is really implicitly describing is that taste is the province of rich people. If one has to strive or worry or self promote or anything like that, with regard to an aesthetic decision, it is easy to mark as tasteless. In most cases, the people with access to the kinds of habits that allow them to act in matters of aesthetic without interest are rich.

The main reason people drive themselves in circles, talking about taste and subjectivity, and college-educated words for subjectivity is because we don’t want to admit that it is bound up in class and upbringing. That and not the passage of time is why it is so hard to understand Kant on this matter. He’s describing a fiction that we agreed upon so that we didn’t have to talk about the influence of money.

armchairhacker• 5 months ago

Ok, but there's no consensus that AI is bad taste. For example, I believe that AI art looks bad, but many boomers on Facebook apparently love it.

"that's just your opinion man"...But we don't believe that

Why not? Many people have opinions I strongly disagree with, but I don't question that they actually have the opinion.

zoogeny5• 5 months ago

we are constantly seeking consensus

I disagree, it seems to me that most people are seeking validation. In that sense, we don't want some global consensus, but a consensus within a specifically chosen group that proves our membership.

m3kw94• 5 months ago

Taste in the public, means how others perceive it, not totally yourself only. Have good taste for yourself isn't what is being talked about here. It is subjective but the public component and meeting the trend then leading it without too much shock is tough. Copying can be tasteful, you need to know what's good to copy, but there is no wow factor.

wseqyrku• 5 months ago

Taste is subjective.

I would like to offer a counterexample: iPhone, when it first came out anyways. Tasteful design is rather so obvious that when you see it you'd say yes, this is what anyone would expect from a "phone". That doesn't seem to be so subjective.

sarchertech2• 5 months ago

Except for all the people who used it and realized they hate touch screens for typing.

plorkyeran• 5 months ago

That was not at all the universal response to the iphone. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone is a (nsfw) contemporary article that I agreed with at the time, and I knew a decent number of people who got an early iphone and then switched back to a blackberry.

verdverm• 5 months ago

One thing I won't do though, is complain about how there's now 1 million todo apps that aren't up to my standards.

HN is generally considered a filter in industry, or a place to launch and make a hot start. The author is making their comments from the context of Show HN, where we expect some self-filtering, for quality and appropriateness.

What we see in Show HN the last few weeks is slop, submissions where the time from first commit to posting on HN is less than an hour. I've been posting some selections to Bluesky. The fastest I've seen so far is 25m [1]

I fully agree with everything you said and everything the author said. The two are not mutually exclusive.

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mf2hygnbkc2o

j45• 5 months ago

Software is for the end user, not for critics and opinionists, they are welcome to create software too.

There are so many problems that people have that have never been important enough to get solutions, that now can.

It's less about taste and more about experience and outcomes now.

The way we built software in the past, including the processes, ceremonies

dkarl• 5 months ago

Application design is still a challenge. I had Monday off and vibe-coded up an app that I've been wanting to use for years. The thing is, I can tell it's going to be challenging to make it something sticky that I actually use.

Which makes sense. The reason I wanted to make this app is that there are two very popular paid apps in the same category that I use every day that don't quite feel the way I want them to. It'll be easy to fix the little annoyances and missing features, but there's a feeling that's missing from them as well. I don't think it's wrong to say that I'm put off by a lack of taste, at least according to my taste. I don't know if I can do better, but I'm looking forward to trying, and I love that Claude makes me fast enough that the project has finally tipped from "I'd love to tackle this, but I know it's too big for me" (which is what I've been thinking for the last 5-10 years) to "I can make a credible attempt at this."

alansaber• 5 months ago

Implementation is generally the road to discovering that your UX sucks (and hopefully why).

m132• 5 months ago

Most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.

Is there nothing? Great, go ahead and fill the void.

Is there so much that it becomes overwhelming to even look? If so, ask yourself: does your thing have any significant differentiators? Are you willing to maintain it? Do you want the people who come after you to see one more option in the sea, or an existing project made better thanks to your changes?

It's about respecting the time of one another. If I'm looking for a to-do app, I'm looking for a good one, at least in the ways that matter to me. Not for thousands of applications with the same exact issues. And so are you. Nobody needs a million of options that suck. We all want a handful or ideally one that does the job.

tristor3• 5 months ago

The most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.

Yes, you should do discovery, but that alone is not sufficient to develop taste. Being an also-ran is low taste even if you religiously meet the market expectations by following a pattern. Just like in fashion, you need to understand the rules to know when its okay to break the rules so that you appear fashion-forward, that is a form of taste no differently.

selridge18• 5 months ago

Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…

Schiendelman• 5 months ago

Instead of using third party apps for a todo list, I recently wrote myself a utility - a background process to reschedule iOS Reminders I don't get to, make sure every reminder I create actually gets a scheduled date/time, and to deconflict reminders from calendar entries if I get an overlap.

It took less than 90 minutes using claude code, I have a testflight I've shared with friends for feedback, and I'll probably put it out there for a dollar once I add a couple more settings.

The built in UIs, syncing, and integrations are really good. It took me a while to realize I didn't need another todo list app, just to tweak the built-ins.

PaulHoule4• 5 months ago

It's a fairly radical idea that AI can (and should!) be doing things invisibly with existing platforms and avoid the whole nightmare of UI development.

vunderba5• 5 months ago

does your thing have any significant differentiators?

When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.

CooCooCaCha2• 5 months ago

I disagree taste is a very real thing and there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.

Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).

Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.

Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.

I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.

casey22• 5 months ago

The problem is that people are often delusional and AI feeds these delusions. You have to switch to objective measures to gain skill and taste. This is true for art (ask: Where is the focal point) instead of "is this good or necessary"

There are long lists of successful programs that market themselves as little more than "like program X, but faster/distributed/higher resolution/bigger map"

tristor3• 5 months ago

This blog post is on point, but it's somewhat interesting to see developers realizing that taste matters. That's fundamentally the idea behind product management as a role within a company, to be an arbiter of taste and to understand customers and the problem space so thoroughly that you have the right feel for things. Taste is often the most important element of product-market fit. Realizing that the vibe app you built doesn't have a need to exists is all about finding a failure of product-market fit.

There's a whole lot of people wrestling with something that is the core purpose of an entire career that is often derided as being useless, and folks are realizing maybe it's the only thing that will matter in the future.

devinprater• 5 months ago

Lol last night, on a forked and accessible version of Termux I vibecoded into existence, on an Emacs and Emacspeak vibejiggered to work on Termux, I vibecoded, with gptel-agent, an Emacspeak package to make it speak when tool calls are being asked for by the model, and automatically speak any explanatory text after all the tools are called and edits are made. All on my phone with a Bluetooth keyboard. It's so easy, even a blind man can do it! :)

And because it's all controlled by me, I can tell it how to have the package speak, what it should ignore, and I'm not stuck with whatever some sighted person at some big company thinks a blind person wants. Everything should at most be open source, and at least be hackable.

All that to say, AI has helped me out a ton. Now I can be as productive as Emacs, and a Linux terminal, and maybe one day a Linux GUI with real Firefox and such, allows. And it would have *never* happened without AI.

So let's please do continue bringing on the AI. Make it smart and local, so I can have continuous AI descriptions right on my phone, with the ability to screen share or even agent-control my phone to get around inaccessible apps. Oh and fix AI app accessibility so the app sends output to screen readers when I type to it cause I hate talking to my phone and not every blind person wants to speak all the time. Ugh I hate that stereotype.

1ark• 5 months ago

This is so amazing! I am so stunned and deeply interested on how you set it up and your workflow. To me it sounds like you are already in the future many of us sighted people imagine with AI.

I am not sure if you are able to use it, but I saw Droidrun.ai (https://www.droidrun.ai/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.

selridge18• 5 months ago

So it’s taste now, eh?

The last redoubt of the old world.

Jimmc414• 5 months ago

I respect the feelings behind the post and I agree with a large part of it. I’m inclined to disagree on a few points made. The core problem is outsiders without taste are showing up in a space where there is a long history of dues paid by the current occupants. But how is taste developed? It’s not innate, unfortunately it’s a product of the long ugly process you are currently witnessing. Think back to the first program you were proud of and judge it with today’s eyes.

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

https://archive.is/a9Cli

I've grabbed the archive link for anyone with it struggling to load. It's a single replica running with fairly modest settings on my office server so I'm proud it's managed to live so far even with some load time, but will scale up before my next blog post.

athrowaway3z• 5 months ago

I've seen this played out 3 times with none devs i know personally. Somebody had an idea, starts vibing and feeling like they're making insane progress and cool stuff, but what can most generously be summarized as: a big Meh.

Most of all, there is now an illusion of a lower barrier to entry.

Arguably, there has never been a higher barrier to entry.

The benefits accrue to the skilled. We all got X% more powerful, and those who were already skilled to begin with get a proportionally better outcome.

PaulHoule4• 5 months ago

I get exhausted very quickly reading stuff about AI by people who think there is some secret language of prompts or some better model or better framework which will make them successful at developing things.

I'm left with the same feeling I have when I read blogs by celebrity managers and developers like DHH or Spolsky or Graham or Atwood or Yegge, they talk as if you could learn something transferable from their experiences except... you can't. Their opinions about spaces or tabs or whether you should use static or dynamic languages are as good as anybody else's but not better!

The difference is that those guys actually made something and sold it, whereas the vibe coder almost made something.

People who make something significant with AI are going to do it because of all the others skills and attributes they have: good taste, domain knowledge, modeling, knowing what good code looks like, knowing what good user interfaces feel like, etc.

That's why I am not doomscrolling X to see what celebrity vibe coders say they are doing right now.

SoftTalker• 5 months ago

By that logic why is anyone here on HN? What good is reading about anyone else's experiences, they are as good as anyone else's but not better.

I still tend to go by the advice I read when I was just out of school: If you want to be successful, find someone who is successful, and do what they do.

PaulHoule4• 5 months ago

I think posts like

https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branch...

https://www.justinmklam.com/posts/2026/02/beginners-guide-sp...

https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-th...

https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/overclocking-the-pico-2

are about reproducible results and are written by people who know what they are talking about and are situated in a frame which doesn't distort their value.

A report on AI coding is usually like a report on what happened when you spent an evening playing the slots -- it's not at all reproducible, half of it is that raw luck (you win some you lose some) and the other half is that "dark matter" of skill and taste which of course is captured in your prompts, particularly as you feed back to that randomness. I can scan those other articles and quickly pick up something cool, "vibe coding" reports just exhaust me.

Past that are all the posts where people who don't know what they are talking about make big pronouncements about what it all means or how it will go and even if they are the likes of Ezra Klein or Scott Alexander it noise and not signal. You could throw a high-signal article into this arena and people wouldn't recognize it for all the noise.

So yeah, I go to the /new page quite often and find there are 22 articles about AI (probably 20 are noise) and 8 articles that aren't about AI and I will upvote the 8 even if some of them are noise, at least they are noise about something that's not AI.

pu_pe• 5 months ago

Ironic that you complain about people posting a to-do app because it's so common, and proceed to post the 100th AI rant of the day with absolutely no original thought in it.

PaulHoule4• 5 months ago

What I hated most about the NFT culture was being approached by people who wanted me to make NFTs out of my photographs and visual art.

At the time I was very much craving feedback and validation but I wanted honest validation, I knew some of what I was making was really good and some of what I was making was crap -- I wanted validation from people who could tell the difference, not from people for whom it was all the same.

tartoran• 5 months ago

Don't mind the NFT culture, they were just some termites in search of monetizing their grift. I didn't bite but I heard of countless stories where artists were either scammed or had time wasted on this. I hope you found your audience and were able to get the validation you were craving for.

amarant• 5 months ago

"The only problem is, no one needs their dream application"

I vibe coded my dream application, and I use it. I wouldn't really say I _need_ a pixel art editor for Android, but I sure do like it!

Do I really need more than that? Am I not allowed to create my dream app, for me? Nobody needs my pixel art either, honestly I kinda suck at drawing, but I enjoy doing it!

Op needs to get off their high horse and stop shiting on people for making things. Go make something and stop whining

ianbutler18• 5 months ago

I'm not shitting on you at all, you're actually not the type of person I was talking about at all. The thread I reference (and link to) at the opening of the blog post sets a lot of the scene. That thread was about Show HN being flooded with slop.

Making for yourself is great, if you make for others you need to actually consider what they need.

Surac• 5 months ago

Reading the title made me think about the USA King. You know the orange one.

scoofy• 5 months ago

I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them. The app authors will they they are great, most won't be great. Some will be great and hugely popular, many will be great but nobody will know or about them, because the attention economy is always hard.

I think that's fine.

What I really think is that most of the logical folks here think we ought to be focusing our attention and organizing to maximize the efficiency of app making, and that vibe-coding really blows that up, because there is no way to know what is quality and what is trash without actually having to do the work and figure that out. That does suck, but it's why creators should have blogs, github/bitbucket accounts, etc, to offer up their credibility to facilitate bona fides.

I think the programming industry is going to become a lot more like the indie game industry, where loose networks based on mutual respect start forming and critics review the newest apps, because you really don't want to waste a bunch actually using all the stuff.

It's inefficient, but that's life.

satvikpendem3• 5 months ago

I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them

Most people don't have blogs though.

yoz-y• 5 months ago

Average person only knows formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars.

barrkel• 5 months ago

The hard thing about coding isn't really the code. It's the data. Both data at rest and data flowing in and out of your system.

Vibe coding creates the illusion that code has become far more malleable. And it has, for greenfield, for a game, for a one-off stateless utility.

But most applications of significance work with a lot of data. Data resists the malleability you have with code. At scale, data is expensive to migrate and it's easy to make a mistake that loses data. With distribution, you may have to act at a distance, and write code you hope will work with the data where it is, and follow careful migration patterns like dual writing, fallback read, ongoing rewriting and so on, at a distance.

Distributed or privacy gated data generates constraints that AI can't easily see, can't easily react to. AI thrives on quick feedback loops. Test-first works great. Testing in production only works when it's your hobby project.

In many ways, software businesses are gardeners of data. Data creates stickiness; when customers decide to take their data elsewhere, or create a new stock of data somewhere else, that's when they churn.

I'm not sure the unleashed masses would be happy to be such gardeners.

And there's a deeper point here, about sovereignty. Even if we have the magical data systems of the future, that the AI can do as you say, even though it's hard to execute, and the AI will still do it reliably: what if you tell it to do something irreversible? To drop a column, to combine separated data into one blob. The AI might advise you not to do it, but the AI can't actually fix the problem of bad judgement without removing your sovereignty. And that would be a very dangerous place to go; I would hope, and expect, that we don't go there.

bsoles• 5 months ago

If you vibe coded any software, by definition, it means you have no skills and no taste.

kelvinjps10• 5 months ago

Why the text is so small? Or it's just me

Philpax• 5 months ago

I wish some taste had been used in the choice of font. Courier New is rather unpleasant to look at for prose.

layer8• 5 months ago

Or any monospace font, really.

raw_anon_1111• 5 months ago

I have no taste with web design and haven’t touched web dev in a decade. I absolutely hate web development and usually delegate it.

On a (consulting) project I’m leading/doing the implementation, it was specifically called out that a web UI was out of scope. But after talking to them and seeing the lay of the land, they really needed a website to manage the AWS implementation and it would help me to.

I put together and ugly internal website that will only probably be used by three or four people. I vibe coded the entire website including authentication with Amazon Cognito. The only thing I personally validated was that unauthorized users couldn’t get to it and that the database user had the appropriate permissions.

That website wouldn’t have been created at all before AI. Is it pretty? Hell no, it looks like something when I wrote an internal website in 2002 in classic ASP. Did I look at a line of code? Nope

rambambram2• 5 months ago

This is the most awkward comment section I've read in a long time. Programmers talking about 'taste'... ouch.

m3kw94• 5 months ago

programmers usually help the taste makers vision come true. Programmer with strong taste means they will fight back, and most companies doesn't want that from experience. they need you to sit down code and stfu

rambambram2• 5 months ago

That's not what I meant. I mean more in the sense of the need to define something in a strict way while it's as soft as can get. The need for definitions, the need for authority, the need for external proof, that stuff.

internet20002• 5 months ago

"You can't scratch your own itch because of reasons" is not a great message. Sure, let's tell people they can't become rich off their pet app, but we shouldn't shut it down.

m3kw94• 5 months ago

basically means you let the LLM design for you and you had very little detail control over the outcome other than to keep rolling the dice till it hits you.

casey22• 5 months ago

This is entirely a problem of AI sycophancy. You would expect a system that has expert level knowledge in so many domains to be overly cynical and straight up tell you that "No, there is no market for a language learning app, Duolingo doesn't teach language it uses dark patterns and fake testimonial to get people addicted"

AI is actually fine at telling you objective metrics for your field of interest, it's just that people ignore them because they already have the thing they want to do locked in their head. They want to build a skyscraper out of toothpicks and the AI does help them, but the goal remains elusive.

The most important metric in language learning is willingness to communicate, an app (duolingo or flashcard) that lowers WTC is the opposite of a language learning app.

alexpotato• 5 months ago

For all of the "saturated market" talk, I always think of the following examples:

- Restaurant Row in NYC is full of packed restaurants b/c people like variety and the demand is high enough to have multiple market participants

- Clorox is a chemical with a fancy bottle and a lot of marketing. They make $150 million+ profit a QUARTER on this [0]

- As someone once said: if it's visible and people see it as part of their identity, there are many brands e.g. clothes, cars etc. If it's not visible, there are fewer brands e.g. underwear

- The ability to personalize applications has been around for over 20 years but people still want predictable user interfaces so they can share with friends, spouses etc

0 - https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/clorox-posts-lower-pro...

anonzzzies• 5 months ago

I am happy with all the apps I am creating only for me. Nice if someone else likes them, but I create them for me. That now takes 1 day from idea to playstore instead of weeks to months. I don't really care if someone calls it slop. My life is better for it so I shall continue.

kolinko• 5 months ago

Exactly this

lumirth• 5 months ago

While I think there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with this particular shift, I find myself struggling to care about it in particular. I get the impression that things will just be… different now. When finding an app for your phone, you might have to skip a few obviously vibe-coded ones to find what you actually want. But that’s not much different from before, when you’d have to filter through ads and apps that haven’t been updated in 6 years.

Are the people that make these apps tasteless? Or soulless? Or do they just have no respect for the craft? Probably. That’s not much different than how things were before. I’ve had tasteless coworkers who only programmed for a paycheck. The were perfectly pleasant people to work with, and I don’t judge them in the slightest. Besides, how do you distinguish an excited novice who genuinely wants to get into programming versus someone trying to extract value versus someone using AI to finally bring a hobby project to life? The same way you did before.

Point being, I doubt HN will suddenly stop being discerning or start celebrating low-effort garbage any more than they did before LLMs. The tasteful remain tasteful. The tasteless remain tasteless. And as such, I find myself more interested in directing my AI-related concern elsewhere.

onesandofgrain• 5 months ago

"skip a few", more like thousands? You doubt HN will suddenly? The mods are barely at work here lolz

andai3• 5 months ago

The overall suffusion of this [slop] into the broader scene rightly has the more sensitive of us up in arms. It's noise, it's spam, it's a perversion of the years of skill we've spent accruing.

I realized recently that slop is not worthless. It actually has negative value! Just think of the Android app store. There are gems there, to be sure, but the gems are washed away by the sea of slop.

overgard• 5 months ago

You know, before AI, one of the things that always kind of puzzled me about software development was that people thought it was super hard, or something only certain people can do. And I mean, the evidence seems to point to that being the case. But as a software dev, I always kind of thought that most people COULD do it, they just didn't really want to invest the time/effort to learn it (which is fair -- it is a considerable investment of time and effort, to be sure; it takes years, even decades, to become good)

Anyway, there seems to be this vibe recently that software developers are "gate keepers" keeping the unwashed masses out or something. But nobody was keeping anyone out -- basically all the tools and knowledge are free! That's how these AI's got built in the first place. But I think what we're really seeing with a lot of these "I'm just an idea guy" people is when they get a magic genie to make their idea.. it's not actually very good. Because good ideas often come from struggling and creating, not just from passively consuming, and if you're struggling and creating you're going to pick up skills needed to create even if they're not coming from formal education. And so I kind of distrust a lot of the "vibe" bros because I'm skeptical of people that think they can get to the destination without going on the journey

pRusya• 5 months ago

HN is like an art gallery full of critics. You can be interested in some works or people, even romanticize it. But no one really cares about a gallery or industry in general. We are all just entertaining each other here.

amunozo2• 5 months ago

Good read, but I have to disagree with the fact that skill and taste are correlated. It's true that learning skill gives you a more nuanced view of the craft that refines your skill. But software is not only for those who have skill in it, but for everybody. Lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste (really, really awful) in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest, with the aggravation that their skill makes them arrogant.

On the contrary, a lower barrier for skill could bring people from other disciplines with excellent taste to make beautiful, even if technical imperfect, pieces of craft.

Kirth• 5 months ago

disagree with the fact that skill and taste are correlated
lots of amazing engineers have an awful taste in everything that is not their immediate field of knowledge or interest

which one is it?

amunozo2• 5 months ago

I clearly didn't express myself correctly, sorry. What I want to say is that one can develop taste with skill in one craft, like software engineering, while having awful taste in others, which is needed for many apps. This means that people with taste in other areas can now create nice software using their taste in other areas

No Skill. No Taste

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