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.
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.
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.
It's purposefully undefined because it's a social concept, not an engineering one. And it's also subjective. You can tell because they use OpenClaw as an example of a tasteful project. I would put OpenClaw in the same category as memecoins in terms of taste. Obviously crypto can be way more harmful, but in terms of taste both are on the "internet meme" category, as helpful as OpenClaw can be.
I'd say taste-as-subjective-something is largely irrelevant. If something "looks good" but hurts to use, that's not much help. If it looks like ass, but is a delight to use, that's not good either (because most people won't reach the point of actually experiencing it). So you need "looks good" and you need "actually delightful to use". Taste seems to be orthogonal to both of those. Or perhaps (two kinds of?) taste is involved in each one.
At which point we define taste as two unrelated things: skill in aesthetics, and skill in ux.
I've seen apps that looked amazing (Taste #1, aesthetics) but made me go, "Okay, did they actually try using this thing?" (Taste #2, usability). I think these tastes are completely orthogonal, from personal experience. I think the vast majority of designers suffer from Total Usability Taste Blindness.
(And, though it feels a bit mean to point out, the vast majority of FOSS suffers from a total absence of both. The winning projects only win because they have no competition, they're the only free option available.)
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/
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.
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
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.
> my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read
Humans learn mastery by doing, not by watching.
I suppose it comes down to whether the most important skill for your kid is to give instructions, or whether it is to actually read and write.
For reference, my kid only just turned 6, and is at the level of reading books without pictures. I'm kinda proud that he reads better, faster and with more retention than kids aged 9, and it didn't come with the ease[1] that "nerding out" on Claude came to your kid.
The question you gotta ask yourself is this: is a skill that takes a 7 year old a day to master really going to make him more valuable than a skill that took a 6 year old 2.5 years to master?
The 6yo who can read can easily do what your kid did, but your kid can't easily do what the 6yo can.
From another PoV: how valuable of a skill do you think "prompting" is when a 7yo who hasn't mastered reading can master it?
--------------------
[1] I started a daily routine when he was 3.5 with the DISTAR alphabet. We did the routine every day, whether it was christmas, or his birthday, even on vacation. Same time, every day.
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.
I can’t actually get to the article on the WiFi network I’m on but when I see “No skill. No taste.” you don’t sound like the butt of that punchline. Clearly you at least have skill, and I’m in no position to judge your taste.
The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.
OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.
> It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like (good) taste to me!
Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.
But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.
It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".
Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!
If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.
I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.
Taste is not subjective. It's intersubjective. Subjective experiences are totally located within a particular subject. For example, "I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm sad."
Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.
According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all
interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being
valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on
concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a
claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.
Taste in the public, means how others perceive it, not totally yourself only. Have good taste for yourself isn't what is being talked about here. It is subjective but the public component and meeting the trend then leading it without too much shock is tough. Copying can be tasteful, you need to know what's good to copy, but there is no wow factor.
I would like to offer a counterexample: iPhone, when it first came out anyways. Tasteful design is rather so obvious that when you see it you'd say yes, this is what anyone would expect from a "phone". That doesn't seem to be so subjective.
> 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.
HN is generally considered a filter in industry, or a place to launch and make a hot start. The author is making their comments from the context of Show HN, where we expect some self-filtering, for quality and appropriateness.
What we see in Show HN the last few weeks is slop, submissions where the time from first commit to posting on HN is less than an hour. I've been posting some selections to Bluesky. The fastest I've seen so far is 25m [1]
I fully agree with everything you said and everything the author said. The two are not mutually exclusive.
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."
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.
> does your thing have any significant differentiators?
When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.
I disagree taste is a very real thing and there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.
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.
The problem is that people are often delusional and AI feeds these delusions. You have to switch to objective measures to gain skill and taste. This is true for art (ask: Where is the focal point) instead of "is this good or necessary"
There are long lists of successful programs that market themselves as little more than "like program X, but faster/distributed/higher resolution/bigger map"
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.
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/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
60 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadPersonally, 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.
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.
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.
At which point we define taste as two unrelated things: skill in aesthetics, and skill in ux.
I've seen apps that looked amazing (Taste #1, aesthetics) but made me go, "Okay, did they actually try using this thing?" (Taste #2, usability). I think these tastes are completely orthogonal, from personal experience. I think the vast majority of designers suffer from Total Usability Taste Blindness.
(And, though it feels a bit mean to point out, the vast majority of FOSS suffers from a total absence of both. The winning projects only win because they have no competition, they're the only free option available.)
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 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.
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.
Humans learn mastery by doing, not by watching.
I suppose it comes down to whether the most important skill for your kid is to give instructions, or whether it is to actually read and write.
For reference, my kid only just turned 6, and is at the level of reading books without pictures. I'm kinda proud that he reads better, faster and with more retention than kids aged 9, and it didn't come with the ease[1] that "nerding out" on Claude came to your kid.
The question you gotta ask yourself is this: is a skill that takes a 7 year old a day to master really going to make him more valuable than a skill that took a 6 year old 2.5 years to master?
The 6yo who can read can easily do what your kid did, but your kid can't easily do what the 6yo can.
From another PoV: how valuable of a skill do you think "prompting" is when a 7yo who hasn't mastered reading can master it?
--------------------
[1] I started a daily routine when he was 3.5 with the DISTAR alphabet. We did the routine every day, whether it was christmas, or his birthday, even on vacation. Same time, every day.
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.
The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.
OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like (good) taste to me!
Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.
But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.
It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".
Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!
No. Silence is better than noise.
If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.
I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.
Judgements of taste, on the other hand, implicate all other humans when they are made. They implicitly demand consensus in a way that is unlike any other subjective claims. This is the only possible explanation for why people will in one breath say, "it's a matter of taste, it's all subjective" and then argue about whether or not The Last Jedi is a good Star Wars movie for hours, if not days, on end. Because the truth is, we are constantly seeking consensus and we usually resort to "that's just your opinion man" when we give up and disengage. But we don't believe that, not really.
According to Kant, "a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality." Unfortunately, it's Kant we're talking about, so trying to understand what he meant by subjective universality is a huge headache. Still, his reasoning reflects the way people actually talk about taste better than anybody else I've read.
I would like to offer a counterexample: iPhone, when it first came out anyways. Tasteful design is rather so obvious that when you see it you'd say yes, this is what anyone would expect from a "phone". That doesn't seem to be so subjective.
HN is generally considered a filter in industry, or a place to launch and make a hot start. The author is making their comments from the context of Show HN, where we expect some self-filtering, for quality and appropriateness.
What we see in Show HN the last few weeks is slop, submissions where the time from first commit to posting on HN is less than an hour. I've been posting some selections to Bluesky. The fastest I've seen so far is 25m [1]
I fully agree with everything you said and everything the author said. The two are not mutually exclusive.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/verdverm.com/post/3mf2hygnbkc2o
There are so many problems that people have that have never been important enough to get solutions, that now can.
It's less about taste and more about experience and outcomes now.
The way we built software in the past, including the processes, ceremonies
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."
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.
When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.
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.
There are long lists of successful programs that market themselves as little more than "like program X, but faster/distributed/higher resolution/bigger map"
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.
I am not sure if you are able to use it, but I saw Droidrun.ai (https://www.droidrun.ai/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.
The last redoubt of the old world.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.