No Skill. No Taste

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

What “Taste” Means in This Context

  • Several competing definitions:
    • Intuition for what people will like vs. a deep understanding of what you like and can consistently realize.
    • Ability to distinguish good from bad objectives (vs. “skill” as ability to execute).
    • Aesthetic sense (how things look) vs. UX sense (how they feel to use), often orthogonal.
  • Many argue taste is intersubjective: it implicitly seeks consensus, not just “my preference.”
  • Others stress it’s niche‑bound and audience‑specific, not globally definable.

Is Taste Easy to Copy or a Real Moat?

  • One view: AI makes cloning trivial; you can “pin” to someone else’s UI/feature set and constantly crib, eroding any lead.
  • Counterview: copying an outcome ≠ copying the underlying judgment; imitators fail in new situations and often produce formulaic or bad work (e.g., mediocre films, SoundCloud sea of noise).
  • Even with identical code, operation, evolution, and long‑term quality can diverge.

Vibe Coding, Slop, and the Flood of Apps

  • LLMs enable “vibe coding” of apps in hours by people with little prior skill.
  • Critics: this produces “slop” and negative-value noise (e.g., generic to‑do apps, shovelware projects, AI-written READMEs), degrading discovery on app stores and Show HN.
  • Defenders: scratching your own itch is fine; more people can build tools for themselves, which is intrinsically good.
  • Tension over “taste” as implicit gatekeeping vs. reasonable expectation to consider audience before promoting work.

AI as Empowerment vs. Taste Erosion

  • Positive cases: a 7‑year‑old building games via voice prompts; a blind developer customizing their tooling; quick internal tools and utilities that wouldn’t have existed pre‑AI.
  • Some warn that heavy use of generative AI habituates creators to mediocre output and inflates their self‑assessment.
  • Others doubt this empirically and see AI more as accelerant than corrupter of standards.

Social, Economic, and Philosophical Undercurrents

  • Arguments that taste is partly a social construct tied to class, cultural capital, and status; others emphasize cognitive wiring and design principles.
  • Product management is reframed as “institutionalized taste” and product‑market fit.
  • Reminder that the hard parts of software—data modeling, migration, ops, long‑term maintenance—remain resistant to cheap cloning, even if code generation is easy.