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.

There's no meaningful taste-skill gap in programming because programming doesn't involve tacit skills. If you know what you're supposed to do, it is trivial to type that into a keyboard.

The taste-skill gap emerges when you intellectually recognize what a quality creation would be, but are physically unable to produce that creation, and judge the creations you are physically capable of producing as low quality

The oft cited example is drawing a circle. Everyone knows what a perfectly round circle looks like, but drawing one takes practice.

It doesn't take practice to type code. If you know what code you're supposed to write, you write it. The problem is all in the taste step, to know what code to write in the first place.

That's absolutely not the case. I can look at code and realize that it's garbage because the architecture sucks, performance degradation is out of the window, and there's lots of special casing and unhandled edge cases. That's the taste part. But I can also absolutely be underqualified and be unable to figure out how to improve the architecture, fix performance issues, or simplify special/edge case handling.