Fetching from the wire…
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
Public story · 2026-08-07 · high
A second essay made the same argument through cooking a steak, and its replies argued back more than they agreed.
Why now: Both essays posted within 48 hours of each other, landing together on August 7.
NotAShelf's essay hit 483 points and 349 comments in under a day. It argues the scarce skill in software shifted from making things to judging what deserves to exist. Idea to working software now takes almost no effort, so the bottleneck moved to deciding what's worth keeping.
The essay leans on Sturgeon's Law, the old rule that 90% of everything is mediocre. That ratio holds even as output goes infinite, so the noise floor keeps rising while the signal doesn't move. Taste comes from repeatedly making bad work and learning to recognize it, per the essay.
A separate essay made the same point through cooking a steak: it takes little skill now, but knowing when it's actually good still does. That post hit 375 points, and its comment count topped its points, a ratio above 1.0 that signals real pushback in the replies.
I've made this argument for about a year. Watching two unrelated threads make the same point in two days feels less like being right early and more like watching the room settle on it.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Shared entity: Taste / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover Taste; overlapping topics (output, taste); earlier Taste coverage from 2026-06-10.
Both cover Taste; overlapping topics (argu, taste); earlier Taste coverage from 2026-06-08.
Shared topic / Tension
Overlapping topics (argu, claim, comment); pushes against this story (against).
Overlapping topics (argu, comment, output); pushes against this story (against).
Shared entity: Taste / Earlier coverage
Both cover Taste; earlier Taste coverage from 2026-08-04.
Both cover Taste; earlier Taste coverage from 2026-04-29.
Shared topic / Tension
Overlapping topics (claim, comment); pushes against this story (disputes).
Overlapping topics (argu, argument); pushes against this story (vs).