No Skill. No Taste

Source: Hacker News

No Skill, No Taste

Ironic image generated with nano banana to showcase my point.

I was reading a thread on HN and started writing a super‑long comment, rewriting and editing it. I thought, if I’m doing this I clearly care enough about the state of Show HN and HN in general to write a post on it.

I’ve written code since I was 11, worked on larger distributed systems, web apps, databases, search, and more. I have many opinions on the transformation of our profession that is currently underway. Most of all, there is now an illusion of a lower barrier to entry. There is a “magic quadrant” made up of taste and skill, and too many people over‑estimate their taste¹ and their skill (or never care in the first place).

The “No Skill, No Taste” Quadrant

LLMs have people everywhere super excited that they can finally build their dream applications! The only problem is, no one needs their dream application. We see it every day now: someone posts an obvious, vibe‑coded app that is poorly crafted and clearly derivative of an idea so thoroughly saturated it’s literally leaking. This is the lowest part of the quadrant—no skill and no taste. The overall suffusion of this into the broader scene rightly has the more sensitive of us up in arms. It’s noise, it’s spam, it’s a perversion of the years of skill we’ve spent accruing.

The only problem there is you might have skill, but do you have taste? This problem isn’t new. HN, of all places, has always been a matter of taste. Things people found interesting made it to the front page; things they did not languished. You could build the most finely abstracted todo app of all time and your app would be dead on arrival. However, if you built something that resonated with a large enough group of people, it never mattered how well‑built the app was or how technically complex.

Taste vs. Skill in Practice

I’ve seen plenty of content on HN that could not have been more than a simple CRUD app that rocketed to the front page. What comes to mind immediately is a little app that died if someone hadn’t posted a message on it in 24 hours. Inherently simple, but quite popular. It was pure taste.

Taste and skill are related: the more saturated something is, the higher the skill you need to cross the taste threshold to make people care. It’s not that there will never be another interesting todo app; it’s that it has to be so tasteful as to cross our maximal standards and pre‑existing expectations.

LLMs have exposed this more thoroughly than any other time in tech so far. The sin isn’t that someone uses an LLM to generate an application², vibe³ or not. The sin is they lack enough skill and enough taste to cross the actual threshold the rest of us need to see for the work to not be slop.

A Recent Example: OpenClaw

An obvious and recent example is OpenClaw. It is a bit of a software nightmare (sorry, Peter, I know you’re good), but it’s highly tasteful even being pretty vibey. People ate it up immediately, and because there was such interest the lack of technical soundness and security was overlooked (or begrudgingly put up with).

The lack of taste only presents a problem now because it’s so much easier for people who think they have more taste than they actually do to post every little idea they have. This is a real problem, and I think it will taper off because people will learn proper etiquette or face disappointment. It’s a massive educational period for a lot of people that we’ve all had years to internalize.

It has the same stink of crypto on it right now—anyone can get rich. Most of them won’t. This is the illusion of a lower barrier to entry; the barrier has always been taste, and LLMs do nothing to remove this barrier. They amplify it.

Anyway, this is all to say: whether you have skill or not, you better learn to be tasteful before you decide to slop all over everyone.

Footnotes

1. Taste is totally dependent on the group you’re building for. Discerning whether you have good taste—and for whom—is a process that requires putting things out to people. The bar has never been on the floor, so I assert there’s a minimal universal taste we all share; you should at least clear that before publishing. ↩

2. I’ve been writing code for 20 years, am super experienced in my domains, and I review and sand off the edges, make changes myself, etc. I vibe code almost 0 % of the time. ↩

3. Vibing means you need to have exceptional taste to cross the bar. I don’t care if you do it, but you need to own the outcome. ↩