No Skill. No Taste

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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