11 ms·

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.

Loughla 1y ago
This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist. It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.
- jchw 1y ago
  > It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too. It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree. Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  I usually see the opposite. Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it. Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it. The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying. One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
    - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
      Unfortunately the majority don't think like this and will take whatever shortcut allows them to go home at 5.
    - armada651 1y ago
      > If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution. Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  >It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt. Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works. This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong. These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large. For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm". And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions. Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it. And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
    - the_af 1y ago
      > Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists... I don't think this is self contradictory at all. One may have beliefs about the meaning of human produced art and how it cannot -- and shouldn't -- be replaced by AI, and at the same time believe that companies will cut costs and replace artists with AI, regardless of any philosophical debates. As an example, studio execs and producers are already leveraging AI as a tool to put movie industry professionals (writers, and possibly actors in the future) "in their place"; it's a power move for them, for example against strikes.
- jibal 1y ago
  This is a radical misrepresentation of the dispute.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    I disagree with you. Please expand.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      Not GP, but I agree with him and I will expand. The fact isn't that we don't know how to use AI. We've done so and the result can be very good sometimes (mostly because we know what's good and not). What's pushing us away from it is its unreliability. Our job is to automate some workflow (the business's and some of our owns') so that people can focus on the important matters and have the relevant information to make decisions. The defect of LLM is that you have to monitor its whole output. It's like driving a car where the steering wheel loosely connected to the front wheels and the position for straight ahead varies all the time. Or in the case of agents, it's like sleeping in a plane and finding yourself in Russia instead of Chile. If you care about quality, the cognitive load is a lot. If you only care about moving forward (even if the path made is a circle or the direction is wrong), then I guess it's OK. So we go for standard solutions where fixed problems stays fixed and the amount of issues is a downward slope (in a well managed codebase), not an oscillating wave that is centered around some positive value.
      - Loughla 1y ago
        I understand that but I'm not sure how it's a response to my original statement.
milkey_mouse 1y ago
If anything it's the opposite, except maybe at the very low end: AI boosts implementation skill (at least by increasing speed), but not {research, coding, writing} taste. Hence slop of all sorts.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
chatmasta 1y ago
This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again. What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy. “I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards… The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems. But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.
- webdevver 1y ago
  what was the $20k/mo business?
  - chatmasta 1y ago
    Selling proxies for scraping… this was circa 2011.
- gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
  >letting perfect be the enemy of good. My attempt to improve the cliche: Let skill be the enemy of taste 2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not
  - whatevertrevor 1y ago
    The issue as the article points out is you can grow taste much much faster by only engaging in consumption, which leaves skill in the dirt.
furyofantares 1y ago
I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap. Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.
- phi-go 1y ago
  To me the argument also only makes sense as you understood it.
- conartist6 1y ago
  The gap will open itself back up again. If you can do anything in 10 seconds with a GenAI, it won't be long until 1,000,000 people have all done it and it's considered poor taste...
- debugnik 1y ago
  Closing the gap? I think we're inverting the gap: Many people now have access to a higher skill level than they've developed taste for (if they ever did), which makes them unable to judge their own slop.
  - ItsHarper 1y ago
    Yeah this type of gap is going to become a huge problem the way things are going
  - dmbche 1y ago
    Might be unrelated, but I feel like the "boost" that everyone is talking about is cause by translating one medium into text, which most people are more capable at than the medium they are trying to produce in. While it lets you create something you previously can't, the qualities of the medium are replaced with those of languguage. I.e. to produce visual images you don't need an understanding of conrtast, composition, tranparency, chroma and all that, you just need to be able to articulate what you want. I think that's where the lack of taste appears, you have a text-based interaction with a non-language medium. How when a movie tries to keep as close as possible to a book it rarely will be a noteworthy movie, versus something built from the ground up in that medium
theshrike79 1y ago
This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill. He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.
- missinglugnut 1y ago
  Being able to articulate taste is a skill in and of itself.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously. Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
    - dpritchett 1y ago
      An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb. I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.
- alistairSH 1y ago
  That’s an odd take for a massively successful person. In the realm of producing hip-hop, his taste and skill are at the top of the industry. Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
benreesman 1y ago
I don't know much about Ira Glass and I'm not going to be a 5 minute wikipedia expert about it, so maybe I'm missing out on very relevant philosophy (I hope someone links the must read thing), but those would be very intentionally inverted meanings of the taste/skill dichotomy. LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction). This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in. All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker. There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something. Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).
simianwords 1y ago
This is not what Ira Glass meant by taste gap. What he rather means is that taste is important. It’s what gets you into the field and what makes you stick around. Happy to be corrected on this.
- michaelbrave 1y ago
  yes that was the gist of Ira Glass's quote, but he also added to it that it makes you feel frustrated when you have taste but are not creating things that live up to that taste, but that as a young artist you should push through that. Here is a copy paste of the quote: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass
nickelpro 1y ago
There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality The oft cited example is drawing a circle. Everyone knows what a perfectly round circle looks like, but drawing one takes practice. It doesn't take practice to type code. If you know what code you're supposed to write, you write it. The problem is all in the taste step, to know what code to write in the first place.
- purplesyringa 1y ago
  That's absolutely not the case. I can look at code and realize that it's garbage because the architecture sucks, performance degradation is out of the window, and there's lots of special casing and unhandled edge cases. That's the taste part. But I can also absolutely be underqualified and be unable to figure out how to improve the architecture, fix performance issues, or simplify special/edge case handling.
  - nickelpro 1y ago
    Then your taste hasn't developed. You don't know what good code for the problem even looks like. It's not that your code doesn't resemble what you wanted to make, you don't know what you want to make at all.
- mjr00 1y ago
  > There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. Strongly disagree here. The taste-skill gap still applies even when there's no mechanical skill involved. A lot of amateur music production is entirely "in the box" and the taste-skill gap very much exists, even though it's trivial to e.g. click a button to change a compressor's settings. In programming, or more broadly application development, this manifests as crappy user interfaces or crappy APIs. Some developers may not notice or care, sure, but for many the feeling is, "this doesn't seem right, but I'm not exactly sure what's wrong or how to fix it." And that feeling is the taste-skill gap.

Loughla 1y ago

This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist. It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

jchw 1y ago
> It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. It's important to realize this is actually a general truth of humans arguing. Sometimes people do disagree about the facts on the ground and what is actually true versus what is bullshit, but a lot of the time what really happens is people completely agree on the facts and even most of the implications of the facts but completely disagree on how to frame them. Doesn't even have to be Internet arguments. A lot of hot-button political topics have always been like this, too. It's easy to dismiss people's arguments as being irrelevant, but I think there's room to say that if you were to interrogate their worldview in detail you might find that they have coherent reasoning behind why it is relevant from their perspective, even if you disagree. Though it hasn't really improved my ability to argue or even not argue (perhaps more important), I've definitely noticed this in myself when introspecting, and it definitely makes me think more about why I feel driven to argue, what good it is, and how to do it better.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
I usually see the opposite. Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it. Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it. The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying. One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete. I won't deny that there is some of this in my AI hesitancy But honestly the bigger barrier for me is that I fear signing my name on subpar work that I would otherwise be embarrassed to claim as my own If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it
  - add-sub-mul-div 1y ago
    Unfortunately the majority don't think like this and will take whatever shortcut allows them to go home at 5.
  - armada651 1y ago
    > If I don't type it into the editor myself, I'm not putting my name on it. It is not my code and I'm not claiming either credit nor responsibility for it This of course isn't just a moral concern, it's a legal one. I want ownership of my code, I don't want to find out later the AI just copied another project and now I've violated a license by not giving attribution. Very few open-source projects are in the public domain and even the most permissive license requires attribution.
ninetyninenine 1y ago
>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other. There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about. Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all. The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt. Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works. This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong. These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  I couldn't agree more, and not just on HN but the world at large. For the general populace including many tech people who are not ML researchers, understanding how convolutional neural nets work is already tricky enough. For non tech people, I'd hazard a guess that LLM/ generative AI is complexity-indistinguishable from "The YouTube/Tiktok Algorithm". And this lack of understanding, and in many cases lack of conscious acknowledgement of the lack of understanding has made many "debates" sound almost like theocratic arguments. Very little interest in grounding positions against facts, yet strongly held opinions. Some are convinced we're going to get AGI in a couple years, others think it's just a glorified text generator that cannot produce new content. And worse there's seemingly little that changes their mind on it. And there are self contradictory positions held too. Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists...
  - the_af 1y ago
    > Just as an example: I've heard people express AI produced stuff to not qualify as art (philosophically and in terms of output quality) but at the same express deep concern how tech companies will replace artists... I don't think this is self contradictory at all. One may have beliefs about the meaning of human produced art and how it cannot -- and shouldn't -- be replaced by AI, and at the same time believe that companies will cut costs and replace artists with AI, regardless of any philosophical debates. As an example, studio execs and producers are already leveraging AI as a tool to put movie industry professionals (writers, and possibly actors in the future) "in their place"; it's a power move for them, for example against strikes.
jibal 1y ago
This is a radical misrepresentation of the dispute.
- Loughla 1y ago
  I disagree with you. Please expand.
  - skydhash 1y ago
    Not GP, but I agree with him and I will expand. The fact isn't that we don't know how to use AI. We've done so and the result can be very good sometimes (mostly because we know what's good and not). What's pushing us away from it is its unreliability. Our job is to automate some workflow (the business's and some of our owns') so that people can focus on the important matters and have the relevant information to make decisions. The defect of LLM is that you have to monitor its whole output. It's like driving a car where the steering wheel loosely connected to the front wheels and the position for straight ahead varies all the time. Or in the case of agents, it's like sleeping in a plane and finding yourself in Russia instead of Chile. If you care about quality, the cognitive load is a lot. If you only care about moving forward (even if the path made is a circle or the direction is wrong), then I guess it's OK. So we go for standard solutions where fixed problems stays fixed and the amount of issues is a downward slope (in a well managed codebase), not an oscillating wave that is centered around some positive value.
    - Loughla 1y ago
      I understand that but I'm not sure how it's a response to my original statement.

milkey_mouse 1y ago

If anything it's the opposite, except maybe at the very low end: AI boosts implementation skill (at least by increasing speed), but not {research, coding, writing} taste. Hence slop of all sorts.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

chatmasta 1y ago

This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again. What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy. “I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards… The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems. But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

webdevver 1y ago
what was the $20k/mo business?
- chatmasta 1y ago
  Selling proxies for scraping… this was circa 2011.
gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
>letting perfect be the enemy of good. My attempt to improve the cliche: Let skill be the enemy of taste 2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not
- whatevertrevor 1y ago
  The issue as the article points out is you can grow taste much much faster by only engaging in consumption, which leaves skill in the dirt.

furyofantares 1y ago

I'm confused. I often say of every genAI I've seen of all types that it is totally lacking in taste and only has skill. And it drastically raises your skill floor immediately, perhaps all the way up to your taste, closing the gap. Maybe that actually is what you were saying? But I'm confused because you used the opposite words.

phi-go 1y ago
To me the argument also only makes sense as you understood it.
conartist6 1y ago
The gap will open itself back up again. If you can do anything in 10 seconds with a GenAI, it won't be long until 1,000,000 people have all done it and it's considered poor taste...
debugnik 1y ago
Closing the gap? I think we're inverting the gap: Many people now have access to a higher skill level than they've developed taste for (if they ever did), which makes them unable to judge their own slop.
- ItsHarper 1y ago
  Yeah this type of gap is going to become a huge problem the way things are going
- dmbche 1y ago
  Might be unrelated, but I feel like the "boost" that everyone is talking about is cause by translating one medium into text, which most people are more capable at than the medium they are trying to produce in. While it lets you create something you previously can't, the qualities of the medium are replaced with those of languguage. I.e. to produce visual images you don't need an understanding of conrtast, composition, tranparency, chroma and all that, you just need to be able to articulate what you want. I think that's where the lack of taste appears, you have a text-based interaction with a non-language medium. How when a movie tries to keep as close as possible to a book it rarely will be a noteworthy movie, versus something built from the ground up in that medium

theshrike79 1y ago

This is Rick Rubin pretty much. He has 100/100 in taste, but almost 0/100 in skill. He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.

missinglugnut 1y ago
Being able to articulate taste is a skill in and of itself.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously. Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
  - dpritchett 1y ago
    An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb. I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.
alistairSH 1y ago
That’s an odd take for a massively successful person. In the realm of producing hip-hop, his taste and skill are at the top of the industry. Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.

benreesman 1y ago

I don't know much about Ira Glass and I'm not going to be a 5 minute wikipedia expert about it, so maybe I'm missing out on very relevant philosophy (I hope someone links the must read thing), but those would be very intentionally inverted meanings of the taste/skill dichotomy. LLMs are good at things with a lot of quantity in the training set, you can signal boost stuff, but its not perfect (and its non-obvious that you want rare/special/advanced stuff to be the sweet spot as a vendor, that's a small part of your TAM by construction). This has all kinds of interesting tells, for example Claude is better at Bazel than Gemini is, which is kind of extreme given Google has infinite perfect Bazel and Anthropic has open source (really bad) Bazel, so you know Gemini hasn't gotten the google4 pipeline decontamination thing dialed in. All else equal you expect a homogenizing effect where over time everything is like NextJS, Golang, and Docker. There are outlier events, like how Claude got trained on nixpkgs in a serious way recently, but idk, maybe they want to get into defense or something. Skill is very rarely the problem for computers, if you're considering it as district from taste (sometimes you call them both together just skill).

simianwords 1y ago

This is not what Ira Glass meant by taste gap. What he rather means is that taste is important. It’s what gets you into the field and what makes you stick around. Happy to be corrected on this.

michaelbrave 1y ago
yes that was the gist of Ira Glass's quote, but he also added to it that it makes you feel frustrated when you have taste but are not creating things that live up to that taste, but that as a young artist you should push through that. Here is a copy paste of the quote: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” ― Ira Glass

nickelpro 1y ago

There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality The oft cited example is drawing a circle. Everyone knows what a perfectly round circle looks like, but drawing one takes practice. It doesn't take practice to type code. If you know what code you're supposed to write, you write it. The problem is all in the taste step, to know what code to write in the first place.

purplesyringa 1y ago
That's absolutely not the case. I can look at code and realize that it's garbage because the architecture sucks, performance degradation is out of the window, and there's lots of special casing and unhandled edge cases. That's the taste part. But I can also absolutely be underqualified and be unable to figure out how to improve the architecture, fix performance issues, or simplify special/edge case handling.
- nickelpro 1y ago
  Then your taste hasn't developed. You don't know what good code for the problem even looks like. It's not that your code doesn't resemble what you wanted to make, you don't know what you want to make at all.
mjr00 1y ago
> There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard. Strongly disagree here. The taste-skill gap still applies even when there's no mechanical skill involved. A lot of amateur music production is entirely "in the box" and the taste-skill gap very much exists, even though it's trivial to e.g. click a button to change a compressor's settings. In programming, or more broadly application development, this manifests as crappy user interfaces or crappy APIs. Some developers may not notice or care, sure, but for many the feeling is, "this doesn't seem right, but I'm not exactly sure what's wrong or how to fix it." And that feeling is the taste-skill gap.