"In a world where AI produces garbage faster, taste and judgment become the only things worth optimizing for—and coding itself becomes a rare artisanal act, like calligraphy."
Evidence from the Archive
Lovable
Lovable's first 'vibe coding engineer' spends 100% of his time on judgment and taste — and a full day writing PRDs before touching the code generator
Lazar Jovanovic gets paid to produce software without writing code by hand, and his view is that AI is an amplifier: if you don't have taste, you produce garbage faster
Lazar has arguably the cleanest incentive to say AI commoditizes craft: his entire job is producing software without writing code by hand. And yet his view is the opposite. AI is an amplifier, and the amplification works both directions — if you have taste, AI makes you dramatically more productive; if you don't, you produce garbage faster. That asymmetry makes taste more valuable, not less.
He spends an entire day writing PRDs (master plan, implementation plan, design guidelines, user journey) before letting Lovable touch anything, because setting the course is where the leverage lives. He uses an Aladdin-and-the-Genie analogy: the tool grants exactly what you ask for, so the quality of the ask — clarity, specificity, knowing what good looks like — is the whole game.
In Lazar's own words: "AI, regardless of your background, is an amplifier. If you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster." (His central framing: AI multiplies whatever taste you bring to it, including zero.)