Comment by eggplantiny

The "consumption" frame is more honest than "craft," agreed. But it falls into the exact same hole. Taste accumulation, attention capture, gift economy, signal fortress—they're all variations of "how do I assetize the byproducts?" The frame changed, but the question didn't: what do I get out of this?

The author already touched on a better answer. Scenius worked because of the "permission to fuck around." Nobody expected your Arduino to ship. But the conclusion hands you four value-capture strategies and quietly revokes that permission. "Play freely, but collect the exhaust" isn't permission—it's a conditional license.

I once learned songwriting from an indie musician who refused autotune and wrote by hand. He said the point of busking isn't playing because there's an audience. It's playing when nobody stops. You play anyway. That's how you find your sound.

This gets at the root of "evaluative anesthesia." It's not that our tools are too powerful. It's that we're asking "is this valuable?" at every step. A busker doesn't ask that. Taste and judgment accumulate as a residue of immersion, not deliberate capture.

What vibe coding needs isn't a smarter consumption strategy. It might just be the courage to play to an empty street.