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.

> 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.

Strongly disagree here. The taste-skill gap still applies even when there's no mechanical skill involved. A lot of amateur music production is entirely "in the box" and the taste-skill gap very much exists, even though it's trivial to e.g. click a button to change a compressor's settings.

In programming, or more broadly application development, this manifests as crappy user interfaces or crappy APIs. Some developers may not notice or care, sure, but for many the feeling is, "this doesn't seem right, but I'm not exactly sure what's wrong or how to fix it." And that feeling is the taste-skill gap.

If you know what sound you want to hear, but don't know the compressor settings to make that sound, that is a taste-skill gap.

If you don't know what sound you want to hear at all, that's undeveloped taste.

If you know what code you want to type, but don't know how to use a keyboard, that would be a taste-skill gap.

If you don't know what code you want to type at all, that's undeveloped taste.