TECH Signal 379
Taste Is All That's Left
An essay arguing that as AI collapses the effort required to produce working software, the remaining differentiating skill for engineers is taste, the judgement to discern which solutions are right, which was traditionally forged through the very friction that AI now eliminates.
For anyone building or operating software, the value of their work is shifting from production capability to evaluative judgement. If taste is developed through friction and failure, teams that rely heavily on generated code may produce competent output without developing the discernment to recognize when that output is wrong.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
The effort required to turn an idea into working software, the production wall, has collapsed, making generation cheap but judgement scarce.
Taste, defined as the wordless verdict that recognizes quality before justifying it, is now the hardest and most valuable part of engineering work because it was never mechanical.
Taste was built through friction and repeated failure; removing that friction risks producing developers who achieve fluency without the apprenticeship that builds discernment.
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