Software developer raf, who learned the craft by building and breaking web applications, describes a new apprenticeship problem that starts with an apparent success: a beginner can generate competent work on day one.

I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion of your own mistakes, sat with long enough to sting.

The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum. Every wall I cursed while climbing it was, without my noticing, teaching me which walls were worth climbing. The cost that rationed my output also educated my judgement, because paying the cost over and over is how you learn what is worth paying for.

For designers, the old bottleneck did two jobs at once. Producing a weak concept, defending it in critique, watching it fail with users, and revising it made bad choices costly enough to remember. AI can compress that cycle into a polished mockup before a beginner has learned what to reject.

raf on the cost of taste:

This is the quiet cruelty of the situation and I do not have a comforting way to phrase it. Taste is slow. It says “no, again.” It sends the plausible thing back because plausible is not the same as right, and while it is doing that, the person without it has already shipped, closed the ticket, and moved on. The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does not show up in the diff.

That makes critique more important, not less. Design teams need to value frank feedback from the skeptics in the room, not only the ones who ship fast.