raf, writing at notashelf.dev, on what’s left to matter once AI can make anything:
They will be able to make anything, and unable to tell (or stop to think) whether they should.
Where does taste actually come from, then, if not from making things:
Where did your taste come from?
No really. Where did it come from, was it genetic? Were you abducted by aliens one day that forcefully injected your sense of taste into your mind and wiped your memory?
I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion of your own mistakes, sat with long enough to sting.
And the conclusion, which is the part that stuck with me:
Which means the scarce act is no longer making. It is choosing. Deciding what, out of the endless generated plausible, deserves to exist and be kept. Curation was a minor virtue when things were expensive to make. It is the whole game when they are free.
I’ve been building GPXplore and used AI to ship over a hundred pull requests, and I’m now in the middle of rewriting big pieces of it because I’m not happy with how the first round works for the average user. This is exactly where taste comes in, knowing when something is actually good enough, not just when it runs. The upside for someone like me, with a development background but not the raw output speed AI gives you now, is that I can explore an idea all the way down a path, realize it isn’t working, and go back and rework it. Maybe the second pass lands, maybe it doesn’t, but taste was always the deciding factor. The difference now is I used to have to compromise on my taste because building further was expensive. Now I can push further before I have to decide.