There are subheadings every 3 paragraphs and enough bullets to reload a machine gun.
There are also neither any sources nor any personal anecdotes. Everything feels generic.
> Over time, this changes how you work. You stop admiring polish for its own sake. You get faster at spotting empty specificity, borrowed tone, and fake confidence.
“Empty specificity, borrowed tone and fake confidence” describe the article itself.
It's getting bad here; I've seen at least three obviously AI-written "anti-AI" or "AI critical" pieces hit and remain on the front page in the last week. I can't help but think about Bill Hicks on marketing: "Everyone here who’s in marketing is now thinkin' the same thing: 'Oh, cool. Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market.'"
It’s also possible this is the first iteration of the loop described in the “A practical loop for training taste” section. Which would be less of a “prank” and more of “using the HN audience to feed the machine”.
The loop (some points snipped for brevity):
> 1. Pick one high-leverage artifact from your week. A paragraph…
> 2. Generate 10 to 20 versions with an AI model.
> 3. For each version, write one sentence that starts with "fails because..."
> 4. Rewrite the strongest version with a hard constraint…
> 5. Ship the final version somewhere real and observe what happens.
No - at face value, our work has diminished value. The entire supply and demand economics of our careers is changing in the blink of an eye.
There are people trying to figure out what this means and where to create value. "Taste is the only moat" is one such hypothesis. "Senior engineers will be fine" is another.
Everything is super frothy right now and we're in for a wild 2026.
I agree.
For those who didn’t read the article…
There are subheadings every 3 paragraphs and enough bullets to reload a machine gun.
There are also neither any sources nor any personal anecdotes. Everything feels generic.
> Over time, this changes how you work. You stop admiring polish for its own sake. You get faster at spotting empty specificity, borrowed tone, and fake confidence.
“Empty specificity, borrowed tone and fake confidence” describe the article itself.
It's getting bad here; I've seen at least three obviously AI-written "anti-AI" or "AI critical" pieces hit and remain on the front page in the last week. I can't help but think about Bill Hicks on marketing: "Everyone here who’s in marketing is now thinkin' the same thing: 'Oh, cool. Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market.'"
The rest of that is also still gold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
Yeah I feel like we’re getting pranked here
It’s also possible this is the first iteration of the loop described in the “A practical loop for training taste” section. Which would be less of a “prank” and more of “using the HN audience to feed the machine”.
The loop (some points snipped for brevity):
> 1. Pick one high-leverage artifact from your week. A paragraph…
> 2. Generate 10 to 20 versions with an AI model.
> 3. For each version, write one sentence that starts with "fails because..."
> 4. Rewrite the strongest version with a hard constraint…
> 5. Ship the final version somewhere real and observe what happens.
Indeed, no taste.
No - at face value, our work has diminished value. The entire supply and demand economics of our careers is changing in the blink of an eye.
There are people trying to figure out what this means and where to create value. "Taste is the only moat" is one such hypothesis. "Senior engineers will be fine" is another.
Everything is super frothy right now and we're in for a wild 2026.