Dan Koe published a piece this week arguing that we are in a second Renaissance, that the future belongs to people who refuse to be one thing, and that proof of work replaces the resume, an audience replaces the employer, and taste replaces credentials.
It describes me almost exactly. Sommelier who builds software. Runs a floor at night and ships code in the morning. Refuses to pick a lane and has been told, more than once, that this is a problem.
Which is why I want to argue with it.
Agreeing with an essay that flatters you is not thinking. And there is one claim in it that I think is wrong in a way that will cost people money and years, and I know that because I have the exact credentials he says are being replaced.
What is right, and I have said it myself
The mechanical half of skilled work is being automated and the human role moves up a layer. The scribe became the editor. That is correct, and I have written the restaurant version of it: the parts of my job I can do sitting down are the parts that are going away.
Judgment is the scarce thing. Also correct. The output of a model has no perspective and somebody has to supply one.
So we agree on the destination. My problem is with the road he says gets you there.
Taste replaces credentials
This is the line, and it is the one people will repeat.
The version of the Renaissance story that gets repeated is simple. Nobody cared about your niche, they cared what you were capable of. Leonardo walked into Verrocchio's workshop to learn painting and walked out knowing anatomy, engineering, optics, and bronze casting.
Except he did not walk in.
Leonardo was born outside marriage, and the guild his father belonged to, the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, did not accept the illegitimate sons of its members. A notary was a certified witness whose trustworthiness had to be beyond question, so the guild required a man fully inside respectable society. The one career his father could have handed him was closed by rule before he could draw.
According to Vasari's well-known account, Ser Piero showed some of his son's drawings to Andrea del Verrocchio and Leonardo entered the workshop. Talent got him taken seriously. His father's standing got the drawings in front of the person who could decide.
That is not a portfolio beating a credential. That is a father with professional standing walking a portfolio into a room most people could not enter, on behalf of a son the formal system had already turned away.
The talent was real. The talent is not in question. The access was arranged.
The apprenticeship is a credential
Here is the part I think Koe misses, and his own essay contains the evidence.
He praises the apprenticeship model. Apprentice to journeyman to master, imitating someone who knows what they are doing until your taste and judgment are formed. He is right that this is how taste actually gets made. It is how mine was made.
But an apprenticeship is a credentialing system. It has admission, it has gatekeepers, it has a hierarchy, it takes years, and it ends with a certificate. The certificate is just a reference instead of a diploma.
That is not less gated. It is less legible. A diploma at least announces itself as a barrier. You can see it, count what it costs, and argue about who it excludes. A workshop placement obtained through a father's professional network announces nothing at all. It looks like talent being recognised.
So "taste replaces credentials" is not the abolition of a gate. It is a change in what the gate is made of, and the new material is harder to see.
I have the credentials he says are obsolete
Two diplomas. Both hard, both expensive in ways that never appear on the invoice. Blind flights, theory papers, rooms where a stranger decides whether you are what you claim to be.
I have written before that no exam ever tested the thing I actually do. Nobody graded me on reading a four top and knowing that the person ordering confidently is guessing while their guest is the one who cares. That remains true and I will keep saying it.
But here is the other half, which I have been slower to say, because it is less flattering.
Those diplomas are the reason I was in the rooms where I learned the thing the diplomas do not test.
The certificate did not teach me taste. It bought me access to the apprenticeship that produced it. People took my call. Lists were opened to me. Somebody senior decided I was worth the hours it takes to correct a palate, over and over, for a long time, and part of why they decided that is that I had already passed something.
Take the credential away and I do not arrive at the same place faster. I do not arrive at all.
The version that is true and the version that will cost you
There is a true reading of the claim: the certificate does not measure the thing. Correct. Completely. A diploma is not a palate and a degree is not judgment, and anyone hiring on the certificate alone is hiring the wrong signal.
There is a false reading: you can skip the certificate and arrive at the thing. That one will take years off people.
Taste is not information, so you cannot download it. It is built by doing the work next to somebody who already has it, being corrected, for longer than anyone wants to hear. Its price is time and access, and access is the part nobody puts in the essay, because access is embarrassing. It is who your father knew. It is who took your call.
The Renaissance did not lack gates. It had patrons, guilds, and workshops with waiting lists. We remember the ones who got in.
The claim I can actually test
One more, because I have run this experiment rather than admired it.
Koe says one person can now do what a team of ten to fifty people used to do.
I built and shipped an AI product on my own this year, so I can check. What it replaced was the sitting-down half of my work. Inventory reconciliation, list building, tasting notes, the same guest question answered for the fortieth time before service. A meaningful volume of that work, and I am glad it is gone.
The standing-up half costs exactly what it always has. A long service still runs on feet. Reading a table did not get cheaper. Knowing when to say nothing did not compress.
His own framework predicts this. The mechanical part gets automated and the human role moves up a layer. He just does not apply it to his own headline number. One person can now produce the mechanical output of a much larger team. One person still does the judgment of one person, and that is the half the whole argument says matters.
The contradiction, unglamorously
He writes that the most interesting people are walking contradictions. Jacked intellectuals. Casual billionaires. Spiritual warriors.
Notice that all three are flattering.
Mine is that I reconcile inventory and read a room. I write software in the morning and walk a floor at night and the two halves rarely have anything to say to each other. Nobody is putting that on a poster.
I think that is how you tell a practice from a personality. A real contradiction is mostly inconvenient. It means two sets of skills that decay if unused, two rooms full of people who think the other room is frivolous, and no clean way to describe what you do at a party.
The glamorous version is how the idea gets sold. The unglamorous version is how it gets lived.
What I would keep
Almost all of it. He is right that the mechanical layer is going, right that judgment is what is left, and right that the people who thrive will be the ones who can run a whole operation rather than one station of it.
I would only cut the promise that taste replaces credentials.
It does not. It replaces the paperwork.
The gate is still there. It has just stopped announcing itself, and a gate you cannot see is not an open door. It is a door that only opens for people who already know it is there.