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.
No Skill. No Taste
71–80 of 222 posts
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#72[deleted]
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#73Hmmmm, where on the taste scale would you put making text unreadable when selected?
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)
I wonder how well this works for you, considering screenshots are a thing.
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#74https://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.
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#75Application 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'l…
Implementation is generally the road to discovering that your UX sucks (and hopefully why).
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#76Yes, a positive from this is those with authenticity and taste will shine. Self-expression will be a form of resistance and we'll see a lot less homogenisation across things like writing, ui/ux, animation, individual websites, blogs. Who knows maybe the old, scattered, personable, decentralised internet will come back - things like MySpace, geocities, sites like this (a lost art): https://www.cameronsworld.net/ Also…
I use LLMs in my fiction writing; and before the wolves come out to shred me to pieces: The LLM never gets to see my writing and doesn't do any of the writing for me. I use LLMs in other ways. One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my re…
This is eerily similar to something I do with Hacker News stories that hit the front page. I run the post against a couple of LLMs (Mixtral, GPT-OSS, Qwen3, etc.) with the directive to produce a set of 20 of the most likely top-level replies.
I then wait a few days, and then use a couple of systems (embeddings, deBERTa, etc.) to rank comments by novelty against the LLM-produced replies.
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#77I'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.
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don’t you tell them that they have no taste? Seems to be what the essay implies.
Because right now they are actually being tasteful?
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.
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#79Most 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 aft…
> 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 kn…
Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…
Re: No Skill. No Taste
#80Most 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 aft…
Instead of using third party apps for a todo list, I recently wrote myself a utility - a background process to reschedule iOS Reminders I don't get to, make sure every reminder I create actually gets a scheduled date/time, and to deconflict reminders from calendar entries if I get an overlap. It took less than 90 minutes using claude code, I have a testflight I've shared with friends for feedback, and I'll probably p…
It's a fairly radical idea that AI can (and should!) be doing things invisibly with existing platforms and avoid the whole nightmare of UI development.