For most of the time I have been writing software, the hard part was making the thing exist at all. The idea-to-artifact distance once defined the craft, requiring hours or weeks of typing, debugging, and grinding through misunderstandings. That wall has now been rented out: you can describe a thing and receive a plausible version of it much faster than typing the first function by hand. The value built by climbing that wall—learning what is worth making—has not disappeared; it has moved. It is now taste: the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is not decoration or preference, but the recognition of quality before you can explain it, like a mechanic knowing an engine is wrong before knowing why. Taste is built not by consuming good work, but by making bad things, living with their failures, and sitting with the sting long enough to learn. The friction of cost and effort once served as both a filter and a curriculum, rationing output and teaching judgement through repetition. Now, with friction removed, people can generate fluently from day one, skipping the apprenticeship that once required making and sitting with bad versions. They become more productive by every metric, yet unable to tell whether they should make what they can. The market times everyone with the same stopwatch and sees no difference between the thoughtful and the indifferent. Taste says ‘no, again,’ sending back the plausible because plausible is not the same as right, while those without it have already shipped and moved on. This cost is unmeasurable, uncreditable, and invisible on dashboards. Slop—indifferent, fine-but-unjudged work—has become the most abundant substance in the field. Ninety percent of output was always crap, but the inconvenience of making it once throttled the flood. Now, with the throttle gone, ninety percent of infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse; the noise became free.
Key facts
- The idea-to-artifact distance in software development has collapsed due to AI-assisted generation.
- Taste is the human ability to judge quality that cannot be automated and is built through repeated failure and reflection.
- Removing friction in production removes the informal curriculum that taught developers what is worth making.
- Taste is slow and unmeasurable, placing those who exercise it at a disadvantage in speed-driven markets.
- Slop—indifferent, adequate work produced without judgement—has become the most abundant output in engineering.