>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026.

Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software is down there will of course be a lot of poor quality software, which will break, expose customer data, be bloated, etc. Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning. Open source, clean code, low dependencies...these are things that can be evaluated by HN crowd types, but it's also something that an LLM can evaluate.

We are entering into an age of software taste. For those of us that have developed taste over the years, we become the taste makers in that we care how things are built, and know what we're looking for. This applies on the supply side, when our taste drives the LLM, and on the consumption side, when we can help the masses evaluate what to use and what not to use.

NB: this is all speculation expressed as fact, in keeping with the OP's style.

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?

Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.

Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?

I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?

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[1] Yeah, I know it doesn't work like that.

It already happened mostly outside the AI slop; only if you have marketing money you will succeed and your clients usually cannot distinguish bad from good; if you have VC money and 1B$ valuation you must be doing something right no?

I walk into products being garbage and basically broken (upgrade bottom doesn't work, email always broken, support form goes to dev null etc) and most products I try are b2b and many are enterprise SaaS.

Only yesterday, I am in the EU, I wanted to try out some enterprise software of a company with VC money valuated at billions, so I signed up for a demo which needed me to validate my email. But that email didn't arrive. I tried with 4 different addresses (different providers including google and ms): nothing. So I forgot about it and went on with my day; hours later, 1 hour after the west coast US woke up, I got all 4 emails with expired links. So I guess while sleeping, their system was broken. No worries, things happen, but they happen all the time and it doesn't matter how much money they have. They also often just refuse to fix things because why would they.

I threw out Canva because they refuse to fix fundamental issues and keep blaming the customers or play dumb 'oh we never saw this happen!' while you can just do a search and find heaps of people having the same issues. etc. Quality does not matter, at all. Deep marketing pockets do.

You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.

"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".

For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.