LLMs have eroded 'legibility of effort' — the ability to tell at a glance whether something took a human meaningful work. Heuristics like 'someone wrote this' or 'someone built this website' no longer reliably signal care or skill. Open source maintainers are struggling with AI-generated PR spam, and vibecoded websites share recognizable default aesthetics (warm-cream backgrounds, Claude-style layouts) that signal low intentionality. The author argues that making good things still requires hard decisions, but conveying that effort to others is increasingly difficult. In response, some people are gravitating toward hardware, physical hobbies, and intentionally rough aesthetics — paralleling how vinyl records re-added friction to music consumption. No solution is offered, but the cultural shift is framed as a hard, new, interesting problem worth watching.
