[mjr00]

> 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.

[nickelpro]

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.

[mjr00]

> 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.

Ira Glass is a writer. Do you think he meant the taste-skill gap was when people couldn't physically write the words on the page they wanted?

[nickelpro]

I'm not Ira Glass, I have no idea what he meant. I would argue that taste-skill gap doesn't exist in writing either.

You either know what you want to write or you don't. If you hate the words you wrote, write something else. If you don't know what you want to write, that's undeveloped taste, not a gap preventing your from expressing your good taste.

[mitjam]

Yes and for me vibe coding / agent assisted coding is not just pouring canned skills but about developing skills to handle this new machine in a way to produce intended results.