An essay on taste as the last scarce skill draws enough scrutiny to need a defense

The essay argues that once producing code is nearly free, the only thing that still separates good work from bad is judgment, what the author calls taste, and that the market currently fails to reward it: "Taste is slow. It says 'no, again.' ... The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does not show up in the diff." Its case leans on Pirsig, Frankfurt, Sturgeon, Morris and Ruskin rather than on data, a study, or a runnable artifact.

The piece drew enough Hacker News traffic, and enough accusations of being AI-written, that the author appended a post-mortem defending his own authorship: "Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this, not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either."

Why it matters: This is an argument, not a report, and it should be read as one. It's included because it's the sharpest published statement this feed has seen of a thesis it keeps encountering elsewhere in the corpus, that falling generation costs don't remove the need for judgment, they just make the absence of judgment cheaper to ship. Its own post-mortem is also a small, live case study in a problem this feed has tracked all week: stylistic tells are being used to convict human writers of machine authorship, and getting it wrong.