Taste Is All That's Left

Notashelf argues that AI has collapsed the cost of making software, shifting the bottleneck from production to judgment. The old friction of building was a hidden curriculum that taught taste through repeated failure. Now novices can generate fluent output without ever shipping a bad version and sitting in it, so they never develop the instinct to say 'no, again.' The cruel twist: taste is slow, but the market rewards speed, so those with taste ship no faster than those without. The post offers no fix, just a clear-eyed look at what remains when technical barriers vanish.

Why it matters: A sharp long-read that shifts the AI-coding conversation from efficiency to taste, with a clear thesis and concrete mechanism. Downside: it's a personal essay, not an industry event, and lacks data or experiments—but the argument quality earns featured.