Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers.

This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI for it, it automatically boosts the floor of your taste, but not your skill. And you end up never slowing down to make mistakes and learn, because you can just do it without friction.

This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again.

What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy.

“I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards…

The most profitable business I built was something I hacked together in two weeks during college holiday break, when I barely knew how to code. There was no source control (I was googling “what is GitHub” at the time), it was my first time writing Python, I stored passwords in plaintext… but within a year it was generating $20k a month in revenue. It did eventually collapse under its own weight from technical debt, bugs and support cost… and I wasn’t equipped to solve those problems.

But meanwhile, as the years went on and I actually learned about quality, I lost the ability to ship because I gained the ability to recognize when it wasn’t ready… it’s not quite “perfectionism,” but it’s borne of the same pathology, of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

>letting perfect be the enemy of good.

My attempt to improve the cliche:

  Let skill be the enemy of taste

2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not

The issue as the article points out is you can grow taste much much faster by only engaging in consumption, which leaves skill in the dirt.

I've heard that one way to pace is to... only consume your own stuff (aka dogfooding :)

More grown-up way to do it is to consume your mates' stuff?

(Trying to go from where TFA left off)