I didn't write this or submit the link, but in case a bit of context helps folks like @OutOfHere: This is an edited transcript of a keynote the author gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. It's sort of a meditation on the state of machine learning engineering.

"And so the question I had, was that, if you have all these people painting flowers, why is it important to paint good flowers? Why do you want to stand out?

"And the same question of, in a world where it’s easy and fast to write code, why is technical excellence still important?"

What's up with people using such poorly descriptive titles on HN? It seems to be a pervasive issue. I flag the article whenever I see a title that is unclear or inaccurate or clickbait or metaphorical like this one. Why can't people use a straightforward accurate title? Clarity in communication is a virtue. For example, for this article, an honest title might be "Why Craft Still Matters in the Age of AI". No one has the time to parse through layers of bs.

Why even post such a poorly titled article on HN at all? We're not running an art gallery here, and if we were, the article's content should still have purely matched the title.