GoKawiilFor most of the time I have been writing software, the hard part was making the thing exist at all.
You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it.
That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. 1 You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing.
Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It moves.
The Bar Went Somewhere
We keep asking whether the machines are any good. It is the wrong question. The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter, and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor.
The floor is now gone. And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it. It is you. Your judgement. The verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function and know, somehow, that two of them are wrong. That verdict has a name we are slightly embarrassed to use in engineering circles, because it sounds soft and unfalsifiable and vaguely aristocratic.
Taste.
What Taste Actually Is
I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration. A matter of preferences. Whether you like your braces on the same line.
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