Taste Is All That's Left

The core claim here is deceptively simple: making things used to be hard, and that difficulty quietly did a job we never thanked it for. It filtered out the bad stuff before it could exist, because a thousand mediocre versions of anything cost a thousand times as much as one. Now that cost has collapsed. You describe something and get a plausible version back almost instantly, and the essay's argument is that this doesn't make the old skill worthless — it strips away everything that wasn't the skill, leaving judgment standing alone and exposed.

The piece leans on Robert Pirsig's idea of Quality from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — the notion that you recognize something is right or wrong before you can explain why. That recognition, the author says, is taste, and it was never the mechanical part of the work. Typing, wiring libraries together, grinding through documentation — all of that was always automatable in principle. Taste wasn't. And it still isn't, even as the tools get better at making its absence easy to ignore.

Here's the uncomfortable part: taste, according to the essay, isn't absorbed by reading good work, the way you can't become a chef just by eating at good restaurants. It's built by making something bad, watching it fail, and sitting with that failure until it teaches you something. Friction wasn't an obstacle to developing judgment — it was the actual curriculum. Remove the friction, and newcomers can generate fluently from day one, skipping the apprenticeship that used to force them to learn what's actually worth keeping.

Worse still, the essay argues the market can't tell the difference between someone with taste and someone without it. Both ship on the same timeline, and the extra hours spent refusing a