9 ms·

No Skill. No Taste

203 points by ianbutler 8mo ago

cjonas 8mo 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-shape 8mo 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/ 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.
  - cjonas 8mo 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.
    - embedding-shape 8mo 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. But then you've only copied one of their choices made by their good taste, not actually copied their taste. If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. Basically, it doesn't generalize.
      - cjonas 8mo ago
        I get that, but you can just "pin" to someone else's taste and they can effectively never get ahead for more than a few minutes. I think (and hope) this won't be as big a problem in the arts because "authenticity" matters to most people, but I for the software industry it feels very disruptive (assuming the models continue to improve and are accessible).
      - lelanthran 8mo ago
        > If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. They won't be able to, but they won't need to either - they can just continue cribbing off the original person, or if they are unable to continue cribbing off the same person, they'll find someone else to crib off. The point is, for all these people outsourcing their thinking, they will always have someone to crib off.
- andsoitis 8mo ago
  How do you define taste (rough is fine)?
  - markbao 8mo 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.
    - aytigra 8mo ago
      I'd say it is quite opposite, a deep understanding of what you like and consequently understanding what will make a creation into exactly what you like. (Well I guess some people can create without understanding, just directly expressing their likes) Since many of our likes are driven by our shared culture and physiology, many other people will appreciate such creation (even if they don't understand why exactly they like it). Others will appreciate depth of nuance and uniqueness of your creation. Opposite to taste is approximated "good" average which is likeable but just never hits all the right notes, and at the same time already suffering from sameness fatigue.
    - bandrami 8mo ago
      It's subjective in the philosophical sense (the subject of the predication is involved with the judgment itself) but that doesn't mean it can't be "right" (and probably more importantly, "wrong").
- mjr00 8mo 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.
  - cjonas 8mo 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?
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > 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? It's the same argument people used to use against open sourcing your code for a SaaS: "If I can just clone the repository and run the service myself, why is there a hosted product?" There is so much more going on though, from how you run something, to how you can react to changes and how you perpetually try to avoid the spaghetti ball from building, so improvements don't take longer and longer to implement and break other things. Even if the original code is the same, two operators of that service can lead to two very different experiences, not to mention how the service will look like in a year.
roywiggins 8mo 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-shape 8mo 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?
  - roywiggins 8mo ago
    Darren Aronofsky https://www.decodingeverything.com/darren-aronofsky-ai-slop-on-this-day-1776/ 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.)
    - raincole 8mo ago
altmanaltman 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.
  - ryandrake 8mo 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.
    - ianbutler 8mo ago
      I'd argue its not definable globally, but within whatever niches you're a part of it probably is. The reason I didn't try to define it when I wrote this is because the question stands good taste "to whom". So like you definitely probably can get pointers from people in your specific niche and if you've been in that niche long enough you've probably developed some level of taste and feeling for what people in that group like and need.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > It's kind of useless if it can't be defined That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :) Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK. If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback.
ossa-ma 8mo 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/ 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.
- bluefirebrand 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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!
    - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
      Why wouldn't it bother you even if you weren't putting it put there for money? Sharing is great. Having everything you share taken and monetized/weaponized is terrible I'm looking for ways to build community that is resilient against LLMs, both scraping and also contributing. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) that means it can no longer happen online
mlapeter 8mo 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 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 8mo ago
  But will he learn to read?
  - mlapeter 8mo 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.
  - lelanthran 8mo 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 8mo 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?
  - mlapeter 8mo 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.
postalcoder 8mo ago
Hmmmm, where on the taste scale would you put making text unreadable when selected?
- gjvc 8mo ago
  next to dark blue text on a black background
- raddan 8mo 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 8mo ago
    I wonder how well this works for you, considering screenshots are a thing.
    - raddan 8mo ago
      The goal is not to make it impossible, just inconvenient. The course textbook is online, but assignments are usually printed in a packet. Students need to synthesize both sources. It’s hard to say precisely what the effect is, but I will say that students performed better this semester on written exams than ever before. Lots of confounds, of course, but I do think the emphasis on having to retype things yourself forced students to really engage with the material. That said, the number of students coming to office hours was WAY down. Given that I’ve taught this course many times over the years, there’s really only one explanation for that.
- ianbutler 8mo 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 8mo ago
The site seems to be falling over. Is that a skill or taste issue?
- ianbutler 8mo ago
  It appears to still be up? It's also running on the server in my office lol
brador 8mo ago
If only we had some kind of voting system that could uplift the good stuff...one can only dream...
lubesGordi 8mo 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.
- ianbutler 8mo 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.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    Why don’t you tell them that they have no taste? Seems to be what the essay implies.
    - ianbutler 8mo ago
      Because right now they are actually being tasteful?
      - selridge 8mo ago
        I suspect because it’s harder to defend your thesis to a person who is excited about what they made. It’s super easy to talk about who has taste or not in the abstract. A lot harder to tell someone straight up they have no taste because of some idea you have.
        ianbutler 8mo ago
OrangePilled 8mo ago
[dead]
dkarl 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Implementation is generally the road to discovering that your UX sucks (and hopefully why).
m132 8mo 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.
- tristor 8mo 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.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…
    - tristor 8mo ago
      Of course they are, taste is a social conversation to align for a window of time on a set of guidelines. Taste is a social construct, being a social construct (or "made up") does not make it any less real or valuable.
      - CooCooCaCha 8mo ago
tristor 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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/ https://www.droidrun.ai/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.
selridge 8mo ago
So it’s taste now, eh? The last redoubt of the old world.
Jimmc414 8mo 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.
deleted 8mo ago
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ianbutler 8mo ago
https://archive.is/a9Cli 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 8mo 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.
PaulHoule 8mo 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 8mo 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.
  - PaulHoule 8mo ago
    I think posts like https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branches-a-one-liner-from-the-cias-leaked-dev-docs.html https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branch... https://www.justinmklam.com/posts/2026/02/beginners-guide-split-keyboards/ https://www.justinmklam.com/posts/2026/02/beginners-guide-sp... https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-the-framework-free-renaissance.html https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-th... https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/overclocking-the-pico-2 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 8mo 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.
PaulHoule 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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
- ianbutler 8mo 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 8mo ago
Reading the title made me think about the USA King. You know the orange one.
scoofy 8mo 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.
- satvikpendem 8mo 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 8mo ago
    Average person only knows formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars.
    - gravifer 8mo ago
      Really glad to have recently passed that bar
barrkel 8mo 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 8mo ago
If you vibe coded any software, by definition, it means you have no skills and no taste.
kelvinjps10 8mo ago
Why the text is so small? Or it's just me
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
Philpax 8mo ago
I wish some taste had been used in the choice of font. Courier New is rather unpleasant to look at for prose.
- layer8 8mo ago
  Or any monospace font, really.
raw_anon_1111 8mo 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
rambambram 8mo ago
This is the most awkward comment section I've read in a long time. Programmers talking about 'taste'... ouch.
- m3kw9 8mo 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
  - rambambram 8mo 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.
internet2000 8mo 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.
m3kw9 8mo 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.
casey2 8mo 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 8mo 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-profit-on-sales-volume-declines-878f3f57 https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/clorox-posts-lower-pro...
anonzzzies 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Exactly this
lumirth 8mo 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 8mo ago
  "skip a few", more like thousands? You doubt HN will suddenly? The mods are barely at work here lolz
andai 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
amunozo 8mo 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 8mo 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?
  - amunozo 8mo 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
    - selridge 8mo ago
      Oh I like this. Taste couldn’t be transitive into software before but now it can.
ValveFan6969 8mo ago
[dead]

203 points by ianbutler 8mo 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-shape 8mo 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/ 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.
- cjonas 8mo 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.
  - embedding-shape 8mo 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. But then you've only copied one of their choices made by their good taste, not actually copied their taste. If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. Basically, it doesn't generalize.
    - cjonas 8mo ago
      I get that, but you can just "pin" to someone else's taste and they can effectively never get ahead for more than a few minutes. I think (and hope) this won't be as big a problem in the arts because "authenticity" matters to most people, but I for the software industry it feels very disruptive (assuming the models continue to improve and are accessible).
    - lelanthran 8mo ago
      > If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. They won't be able to, but they won't need to either - they can just continue cribbing off the original person, or if they are unable to continue cribbing off the same person, they'll find someone else to crib off. The point is, for all these people outsourcing their thinking, they will always have someone to crib off.
andsoitis 8mo ago
How do you define taste (rough is fine)?
- markbao 8mo 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.
  - aytigra 8mo ago
    I'd say it is quite opposite, a deep understanding of what you like and consequently understanding what will make a creation into exactly what you like. (Well I guess some people can create without understanding, just directly expressing their likes) Since many of our likes are driven by our shared culture and physiology, many other people will appreciate such creation (even if they don't understand why exactly they like it). Others will appreciate depth of nuance and uniqueness of your creation. Opposite to taste is approximated "good" average which is likeable but just never hits all the right notes, and at the same time already suffering from sameness fatigue.
  - bandrami 8mo ago
    It's subjective in the philosophical sense (the subject of the predication is involved with the judgment itself) but that doesn't mean it can't be "right" (and probably more importantly, "wrong").
mjr00 8mo 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.
- cjonas 8mo 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?
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > 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? It's the same argument people used to use against open sourcing your code for a SaaS: "If I can just clone the repository and run the service myself, why is there a hosted product?" There is so much more going on though, from how you run something, to how you can react to changes and how you perpetually try to avoid the spaghetti ball from building, so improvements don't take longer and longer to implement and break other things. Even if the original code is the same, two operators of that service can lead to two very different experiences, not to mention how the service will look like in a year.

roywiggins 8mo 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-shape 8mo 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?
- roywiggins 8mo ago
  Darren Aronofsky https://www.decodingeverything.com/darren-aronofsky-ai-slop-on-this-day-1776/ 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.)
  - raincole 8mo ago

altmanaltman 8mo 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 8mo ago
Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.
- ryandrake 8mo 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.
  - ianbutler 8mo ago
    I'd argue its not definable globally, but within whatever niches you're a part of it probably is. The reason I didn't try to define it when I wrote this is because the question stands good taste "to whom". So like you definitely probably can get pointers from people in your specific niche and if you've been in that niche long enough you've probably developed some level of taste and feeling for what people in that group like and need.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > It's kind of useless if it can't be defined That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :) Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK. If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback.

ossa-ma 8mo 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/ 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.

bluefirebrand 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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!
  - bluefirebrand 8mo ago
    Why wouldn't it bother you even if you weren't putting it put there for money? Sharing is great. Having everything you share taken and monetized/weaponized is terrible I'm looking for ways to build community that is resilient against LLMs, both scraping and also contributing. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) that means it can no longer happen online

mlapeter 8mo 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 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 8mo ago
But will he learn to read?
- mlapeter 8mo 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.
- lelanthran 8mo 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 8mo 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?
- mlapeter 8mo 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.

postalcoder 8mo ago

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

gjvc 8mo ago
next to dark blue text on a black background
raddan 8mo 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 8mo ago
  I wonder how well this works for you, considering screenshots are a thing.
  - raddan 8mo ago
    The goal is not to make it impossible, just inconvenient. The course textbook is online, but assignments are usually printed in a packet. Students need to synthesize both sources. It’s hard to say precisely what the effect is, but I will say that students performed better this semester on written exams than ever before. Lots of confounds, of course, but I do think the emphasis on having to retype things yourself forced students to really engage with the material. That said, the number of students coming to office hours was WAY down. Given that I’ve taught this course many times over the years, there’s really only one explanation for that.
ianbutler 8mo 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 8mo ago

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

ianbutler 8mo ago
It appears to still be up? It's also running on the server in my office lol

brador 8mo ago

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

lubesGordi 8mo 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.

ianbutler 8mo 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.
- selridge 8mo ago
  Why don’t you tell them that they have no taste? Seems to be what the essay implies.
  - ianbutler 8mo ago
    Because right now they are actually being tasteful?
    - selridge 8mo ago
      I suspect because it’s harder to defend your thesis to a person who is excited about what they made. It’s super easy to talk about who has taste or not in the abstract. A lot harder to tell someone straight up they have no taste because of some idea you have.
      - ianbutler 8mo ago

OrangePilled 8mo ago

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dkarl 8mo 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 8mo ago
Implementation is generally the road to discovering that your UX sucks (and hopefully why).

m132 8mo 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.

tristor 8mo 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.
- selridge 8mo ago
  Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…
  - tristor 8mo ago
    Of course they are, taste is a social conversation to align for a window of time on a set of guidelines. Taste is a social construct, being a social construct (or "made up") does not make it any less real or valuable.
    - CooCooCaCha 8mo ago

tristor 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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/ https://www.droidrun.ai/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.

selridge 8mo ago

So it’s taste now, eh? The last redoubt of the old world.

Jimmc414 8mo 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.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ianbutler 8mo ago

https://archive.is/a9Cli 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 8mo 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.

PaulHoule 8mo 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 8mo 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.
- PaulHoule 8mo ago
  I think posts like https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branches-a-one-liner-from-the-cias-leaked-dev-docs.html https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branch... https://www.justinmklam.com/posts/2026/02/beginners-guide-split-keyboards/ https://www.justinmklam.com/posts/2026/02/beginners-guide-sp... https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-the-framework-free-renaissance.html https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2026/02/17/web-components-th... https://learn.pimoroni.com/article/overclocking-the-pico-2 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 8mo 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.

PaulHoule 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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

ianbutler 8mo 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 8mo ago

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

scoofy 8mo 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.

satvikpendem 8mo 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 8mo ago
  Average person only knows formulas for Olivine and one or two Feldspars.
  - gravifer 8mo ago
    Really glad to have recently passed that bar

barrkel 8mo 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 8mo ago

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

kelvinjps10 8mo ago

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

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

Philpax 8mo ago

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

layer8 8mo ago
Or any monospace font, really.

raw_anon_1111 8mo 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

rambambram 8mo ago

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

m3kw9 8mo 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
- rambambram 8mo 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.

internet2000 8mo 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.

m3kw9 8mo 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.

casey2 8mo 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 8mo 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-profit-on-sales-volume-declines-878f3f57 https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/clorox-posts-lower-pro...

anonzzzies 8mo 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 8mo ago
Exactly this

lumirth 8mo 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 8mo ago
"skip a few", more like thousands? You doubt HN will suddenly? The mods are barely at work here lolz

andai 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.

amunozo 8mo 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 8mo 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?
- amunozo 8mo 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
  - selridge 8mo ago
    Oh I like this. Taste couldn’t be transitive into software before but now it can.

ValveFan6969 8mo ago

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