On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's "Notes On 'Camp'" often:

“For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea..."

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything.

One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everything they write has almost no signal.

Over a mid sized AI generated codebase that means I’m reading like 500 words to figure out what a module is even doing.

This article resonated tremendously with me, speaking as someone who has been coding since the 1980s and had to develop my own taste the hard way, through lots and lots of mistakes. Whenever I see a software demo built by someone mostly using agents to do the work, I have to question whether it's any good on the inside - or whether any real intuition or judgment went into its design. On the flip side, maybe none of that matters anymore - as long as it works, who cares how it was built.

We've been talking about taste for a year now as it relates to AI, so I'm going to counterpoint it: if competitors can reproduce your features, UX, and visual decisions within days, your taste is not really an advantage. How many apps implemented pull down to refresh once one person did it? How many people even remember (or care) whose taste spawned that UX pattern? [1]

AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is shortening the half-life of taste and commoditizing software. What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore? If you ask me, it looks like business did in the 90s. We'll probably see the return of department store software in the next few years.

1: for the record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh

I found this post a bit too verbose and incoherent. It does read like AI slop to me, but the bigger issue is that its core argument itself seems flawed.

The author seems to be advocating for choosing to "carry the burden" of one's taste (or aesthetics, judgement, standards, etc) while bemoaning that the market may not sufficiently reward for doing so.

IMHO, the core flaw is in mixing these two things 1) the market rewarding what it chooses to reward; and 2) individuals choosing to pursue some external/internal rewards.

I broadly agree with the premise that Gen AI has lowered the cost of software development and, as a result, the quality of the idea and its execution have become more salient differentiators than just the ability to bring an idea to reality. I also agree that pursuing one's own sense of taste/judgment or "objective function" is often intrinsically rewarding and worth it. But ultimately, an individual has to decide how much they want to (or need to) play for the external market rewards vs their own intrinsic rewards/motivations.

But I don't think it's coherent to argue that the market "ought to" reward one for their oh-so-special but mysterious, amorphous, and unmeasurable way of doing things, or that pursuing one's own taste/judgement is somehow automatically an exercise in greatness.

Also just a shout out to the author - you're getting a lot of flak here, but your article hit me at the right time in the right way. I trust you're telling the truth about writing it yourself, and thank you.

> Suppose you have taste. Suppose you paid the full price and you can feel the sag in the sentence and the wrongness in the function. > > Congratulations! You now ship at exactly the same speed as the person who cannot.

Yes, previously the person who didn't understand shipped faster. It was a long standing problem. The people who crapped, got the bonus, and ran were much faster than the patient engineer of quality.

By the way, what were the essays that formulated Claude Style? if the author was indeed formed by them, I'd like to read them - or at least enough of them to understand.

There's a lot here that I enjoy muddling on. And I think taste is very vital. Taste, ambition, seeing possibility: these resonate to me, long resonate, as what I've wanted to see.

And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and what you should shoot for! But there are also people wandering around now trying much harder! And I am excited for those frontiers! I think it will challenge and shake the foundations that we've accepted as true, as There Is No Alternative, in exciting bold and fun ways.

I am however pretty unconvinced by the article. There's a lot that doesn't quite work for me, that isn't building the case I'd like, whose takes are off from my read.

> The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output.

Agreed about the rationing of output. I do think that the article though continues to show a magical thinking. That we have these things now and they autonomously do the thing. That the LLM's have solved it all.

The article itself goes on at length about how nebulous and abstract taste is:

> Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument

But this contrasts so distinctly to me against "the output is good enough". Is it? That depends. That depends on your taste. The proximate first results come quick. But the technics underneath? Those themselves, in my view, rely enormously on engineering taste to support and advance. I think we see a very similar sort of magical delivery thinking, very clearly on display here:

> When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand.

As if there was some magical "good enough" transition where suddenly the aliens came and gave us this box that just does the thing. As if we discovered the right formulas and math and now: we had production. Again I think there's just an enormous amount of work and taste that is still actively required inside the factory box, that building the industrial processes is incredibly intense & difficult, even though we have reliable industry-line production and now robots doing the labor.

There's still so many gems, so much lovely material for thought. I love the provocations here, and I think there's a lot of great calibration.

> The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum.

Makes me think of yesterdays @apenwarr banger,

> Every slow prototype started out as a fast prototype, I think that’s how it goes https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h

I keep seeing people trying to define judgement and taste and then they don’t actually like cite Kant’s Critique of Judgement where this is basically the entire concern.

This post is awful! Annoyingly written and zero insight. Most posts about this taste concept are bad (and there have been so many), but this is below average.

> I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to.

The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after.

There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing.

Too many people have tried to declare victory over software engineering prematurely and it shows.

I find this post disheartening. To my eye, it seems to be the author's first blog entry with obvious LLM contributions.

Given the recent "moving to a farm" ... 7 days later ... "leaving the farm" posts, it's hard not to read this as someone clearly struggling with the burnout which is all too common in our industry, and resultingly giving in to the false promise of a machine that can just handle the thinking for you.

I've run this thought experiment a number of times with different sections of my (relatively) diverse friend circle. I ask them a version of this question on repeat: "what if AI automates X aspect of your work?", and the final answer (either because of frustration with the loopy nature of the question or a genuine stopping point) arrives somewhere along the lines of "my judgement," "my knack," "my embodied nature," or "my quality of decision making."

I think the core still leads back to human agency and the ability to consider aspects that wouldn't fit into an LLMs limited context window or be able to be vectorized into a DB, including ultra-long-term consequences (especially those with great thinking abilities).

I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to "fully" replace humans, because the evolutionary process that led to our cognitive abilities and the way we train LLMs are vastly different thanks to different pressures, but maybe that's just me defending the last bastions of our collective humanity as a human; I don't know what else to root for.

Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time.

But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now.

I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.

So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow

When resources are scarce, you are forced to use them in a meaningful way. You learn to do only what matters most: what is right, minimal, essential. When you need to choose wisely when resources are scarce -- this is how you learn the taste.

Now that creation is cheap, the scarcity has moved to adoption. Things built without taste are less likely to be adopted, to survive. At least that is what I'd like to believe.

Hard disagree on "Good enough", most things are mediocre at best. Despite the massive AI boom I can at best count on one hand "fresh" products made with AI that are meaningful in day-to-day usage. Not to mention most of them seem to be targeting AI-space itself instead of bridging some actual business use case. Just look at all the products on ShowHN, you can "tell" a vibed product in seconds.

This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.

These artsy fartsy takes on a subject that would be better studied as a science are fun but are they useful? I am not saying there is no such thing as taste and neither will I attempt to define taste except to say "tasteless" is probably the opposite. "Judgement" seems more valuable as some have mentioned, maybe judgement and taste together identify something we want?

Still, I like better when we actually do try to name what we're talking about. We've probably all read the motorcycle guys take on quality and things like that right? I guess the theme some are going with is that quality can't be objectively quantified and to define it is futile but I've never liked that take. If we think LLM generated code is low quality then it certainly makes sense to start our attempts to define or at least describe what makes the quality needle move, because language is how we encode lots of information and information is what feeds LLMs.

People also like to rag on uncle Bobs takes, clean code, etc but I like how at least he tried. I've been a fan of his for awhile but I'm not big on objects so don't care about his pushes on that sort of thing. The best take that offered hints that I would call quality is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout, there is plenty of stuff in this short little book that was very satisfying to me, like for instance where Bob wants short/small functions, Mr Ousterhout was much more flexible on this, like for instance maybe some functions can be bigger if the need arises, things like that.

Everybody thinks they have good taste don’t they.

How convenient it is that we’re all so awesome according to the one metric that can’t be measured

My taste agrees with the point made but thinks this could've been a shorter article

If we define taste as the intuitive act of saying "no, again," then I fully disagree with this whole article.

Every AI-frustrated (but LLM-written, sigh) blog post about the loss of taste and craft and hard work in development sounds like we've given up the interaction with the machine. Like human work is sitting back in your chair and shitting on stuff.

That's obviously not true! That's not how any of this works!

It's hard and weird to develop with the LLMs because they just do stuff. Lots of it is good, some of it is OK, some of it's horrible. Unpacking what it's done is hard and weird because software isn't just lovely UX, it's also data structures that scale and performance and privacy and enterprise controls and SOC 2 and onboarding and accessibility.

If you want to build real software, all that stuff has to get done. Today you're working on the feature, tomorrow you're making it scale. It's long-term and iterative and complex and hard to pack into a prompt or a markdown spec.

The work is the work, done at and with the computer, and it's way more than just "taste."

But this is basically reinventing the term "Aesthetics" which is a field that had several centuries of philosophy research about it. Not all of them will agree AI cannot have it.

Actually I think it is possible to reconcile Kant's third critique with the statement "LLM is possible to make aesthetic judgement" (with certain generous application of principle of charity, naturally).

I tend to like images in a split second, when they try to achieve a certain aesthetic at least. I can later inspect them more carefully and understand why they're good.

Reading text, it can either grab me or it doesn't. I've asked about that to an AI and there's some reason for that. Some text is more compatible with me, due to the rhythm or combination of chars/words used, how they actually look/feel, it's not just about the content. So I'm assuming some writers are going to be more compatible with me while others will make me dismiss them quickly or just skim.

I like to think I have the correct objective taste in music, but everybody thinks that about themselves.

Taste will always be there.

But toil is not gone. We have still have code owners, lawyers, physical hardware, thousands of configurations that we can't test them all.

And notably: we will still be asked to write software we can maintain in the future.

Sure, there are short-lived non-critical software projects where LLMs will rule.

But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without reviews. You can argue its because taste is already being enforced in the name of maintainability.

People will always want something to gatekeep their chosen field. Code went away, so now people need to be able to say if the machine wrote good code. In a year or two people won't be able to use that because the code will be measurably better than something a typical dev would write, and in five years it'll be better than anything anyone could write.

Then we'll need to accept that coding is better when it's done by computers, and we'll start telling everyone it's actually the prompts and context that steered the machine that really matter.

In software development, good taste translates to readability, succinctness and maintainability of the code. It also translates to intuitiveness, reliability, security, performance, scalability and utility of the software.

All this doesn't necessarily translate to sales though. Because, to evaluate those things requires attention, trust, time and effort.

This is a significant barrier because a lot of software will appear to meet all of these superficially.

After 1 day of usage, a piece of software may appear to be intuitive, reliable, secure, performant and useful... But then after some time (sometimes a whole week or longer) you run into a critical scenario and discover that it cannot be solved with that software... Or performance drops off sharply after you created the 1000th record in the software... Or a hacker takes months to find that one endpoint which allows full remote code execution.

Even in an optimistic scenario, 1 week is a long time to evaluate a piece of software. I've encountered software which took 6 months and large teams of people to realize that it wasn't suitable. That's how long it took to hit the critical limits. It's a very long evaluation loop.

So you cannot judge new software efficiently by just looking at it. Even industry consensus is problematic if the software is very new and complex... Plenty of trends have fallen off a cliff in the past. You need to understand who is behind the software... And even that's not so easy; social proof can be misleading when it comes to deep technical ideas. The people who are good at social networking aren't necessarily good with tech.

I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. And the irony of it is that the solutions already exist... What doesn't exist is the mechanism to identify those solutions. But even the mindset needs to be corrected first.

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We have the Power of gods. Now we need the Wisdom of gods.

I've been circling this insight for a bit previously, leading me to a convo with AI about how we are now approaching more of a spec - no, prompt - no, context - no, [insert newest paradigm] driven design approach

The point being more that the development does weigh more heavily on having fun ideas to ask AI to build

I think there's probably also a place for people to make guides for AI-assisted programming or even personal essays on their views of "taste" or what they want code to look like?

I see pop up frequently objections to vibe coding (different from mere AI assistance in coding - vibe coding being creating things without looking at the code at all) that it doesn't account for architectural descisions, cybersecurity decisions, edge cases, and other such things. So to me it looks like a next step might be in identifying these things "vibe coding" doesn't do well, that people can learn more manually, so they can do at least AI assisted coding well.

No, the AI is writing code not architecture. And it's the same for all disciplines.

There will be no mass job layoffs for antying but relatively automatable stuff.

> The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does not show up in the diff.

Doesn't that mean guaranteed failure in the market if you use taste as your guiding star? Therefore, there's really no way to enter the market anymore.

I don't know how you then ship software or monetise it...? The market will just clone it.

So... Don't share stuff publicly? Only share with closed groups? Where does this leave small-time software development...?

I agree with the idea that the taste, for lack of a better word, was the only thing that ever mattered. What I disagree with is the idea that slop that is “good enough” is indistinguishable from something that is crafted is “indistinguishable by the market”. I think it is indistinguishable in the short term, but very distinguishable on a long enough time span. The same way that hacked together slop has always been “good enough” to close a ticket and even get someone a promotion, but later costs the company thousands of engineering hours to rewrite once it becomes completely unreliable, slow and impossible to modify. We’re just speed running that now. It’s the same battle engineers with “taste” have been fighting with sales teams and product managers and lazy teammates before LLMs, just in fast forward.

Going to drop this https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/. Tacit experience gives you taste in my opinion.

Whenever I see "is doing a lot of work here", I assume it's AI-generated.

Taste good, taste hard to cultivate, taste easy to fake and hard to prove. There, TLDR.

We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no one care about? No $.

It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric that is as effective and simple.

Very well written, this gave me goosebumps. Full of flavor.

The Rick Rubin meme

If you need a full length blog post to explain it, it's not a good use of the word.

This was a great and resonant post. Don't worry about the green names.

I think there is almost a split between people who have read ZAOMM and people who have not.

I recently made a post in my circles about how "meaning" is what human quality is. If you look at classical art a lot of it could look objectively nonsense and have technical mistakes, but just because the machine can make a picture does not mean that it attributes any meaning or communicate any intention. The difference between human-made classical artwork and machine-made classical artwork is the meaning and symbology behind it

Oof, even the post-mortem promising none of it is AI slop is obvious AI slop.

I think the "taste" described here actually can be formulated as a measurable quantity, just one that can't be accurately measured in practice. According to James Shore's 2006 essay "Quality With a Name" [0], "good design" amounts to nothing more or less than minimising the expected engineering time needed to create a good enough product over the space of changes that are likely to be needed during its lifetime (I'm paraphrasing slightly). Realising this was a revelation to me. I would argue that OP's "taste" is Shore's "good design".

This conclusion may be unwelcome here, since it implies that AI can acquire "taste".

[0]: https://www.jamesshore.com/Articles/Quality-With-a-Name.html

I'm really not convinced that the word "taste", as used in these type of AI discussions, refers to any meaningful concept. The AI that wrote this blog post (look at footnotes 2 and 3!), like many others, is great at defining what it is not and how people psychologically relate to it, but I've never seen a clear definition of what it is.

My best guess is that it's a pointer not to any actual concept but to latent semantic space between concepts. Either a very novel or very Buddhist phenomenon, depending on how you look at it.

Pangram classifies 100% of this text as AI-generated.

Speaking of taste the author basically tells me not to read the article immediately as soon as I hit the page because the commenters on this site (HN) have made them feel so bad about it

I’m pretty sure it was not technology that killed the web it was the kind of toxic crap like that, that we’re seeing from communities and that’s nothing new

i type code by hand

so emacs is also left :)

Honestly, a lot of people are denying this, but the latest models ARE at the point where their systems design generally surpasses mine because they have a better grasp of how the domain of any problem is typically solved.

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This post makes two mistakes.

The first is an XKCD 605 (Extrapolating). The author makes bold predictions for the future as though they're inevitable, but gives zero evidence, because there is none, we're still at T=0. IBM is still in business. Wake me up when it's been taken out by someone vibe-designing a mainframe in kicad. Or even, let's see a dropbox clone get off the ground. Should be easy, right? (It's an HN tradition, after all.)

The second mistake is mistaking a large multiplier for infinity. The cost of code has not "collapsed to almost nothing" as the author claims. Talk to your CTO/CFO if you want the real story. They're probably freaking out over AI spend. But the point is, yes, AI has made things cheaper, but they didn't become monotonically zero.

AI had also raised the bar. You can't ship "good enough" anymore, it has to be great. And great still takes time. Time in QA, time obsessing over every workflow, time talking with customers and planning features.

Taste hasn't even entered the picture, and the analysis is already wrong.

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would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account