Taste Is All That's Left
notashelf.devOn 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'd completely forgotten about notes on camp, had to read that in modernist criticism class. good stuff.
i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like, "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.
"Consistent sensibility" is a tasty little phrase.
I think taste is developed from a combination of sensual attunement (clarity of perception and focus) and experience (exposure to relevant, high quality 'stuff'), but the catalyst is joy, or at least some kind of pleasure.
This is an incredibly insightful comment, thank you. I had not read "Notes On 'Camp'" at the time of writing (and nor do much reading for the post in particular) but it seems very intriguing from what I can find on the internet.
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.
I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around?
Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"?
They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code.
LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autoresearch, not the glue-on-pizza Google search crap). They're good for filtering and classification against rules that can be specified in natural language instead of special syntax or by training dedicated models.
It’s a good question and I don’t doubt they’re useful.
But I mean they’re not good enough to do the things I need them to. Not enough that any difference can be chalked up to “taste”.
Put it this way, if you hired a very good handyman to build you a cathedral, you wouldn’t stand looking at the smouldering wreckage of the construction site saying “oh well that’s just a matter of taste”.
> I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around?
To quote the parent commenter:
> They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem,
but not long term
Breaking down long term problems into small shorter problems we can solve one after another until the long term problem is solved is the essence of engineering.
No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive vision for a larger plan.
No quality large scale project can exist without it. And any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
Lol. That's not true at all. And not how projects are done on startups or big companies.
Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get you to live long term.
But that means they're good enough for the short them. This is why I find it such an interesting question to wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.
Short term can, IME, be very short. I've seen people generate, say, a bash script with an LLM. It's generated: short term, the problem is "solved": we've generated a bash script.
… but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it, "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the script computed … something, but it's just GIGO.
But that "check if this works" friction is the same friction that is what people try to avoid by generating it with an LLM in the first place. If you're too lazy to write the script, you're practically by definition too lazy to verify it.
You can have another agent write the tests and verify the former agent ? This is pretty basic stuff. Makes me question if people are actually trying to use AI
Since they can summarize, you'd really think they would be better at condensing their own output and cutting out the filler after. I wonder if you could use a specialized second pass for it or something?
I like judgement. Taste is a subset.
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.
For majority of people, including business executives it's the latter. No one cares about artisan code. Software is just a means to an end for them and not an art form.
People treat their computers like any other appliance. They don't care if it's riddled with bugs, they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum to get it to work.
I think it's also why marketing and designers get more of a say in the software than engineers. UI polish matters more since it increases sales.
This is the hardest thing to come into terms with in this industry.
> they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page at infinitum
They won't gladly do it. They'll do it begrudgingly because there is nothing better, or they have no choice, and they need to get their work done.
Just because people use your AI-vomited garbage programs doesn't mean they like it.
Time to load is perhaps one of the key metrics software is measured by because time to load directly relates to user action.
Slower load times means user won't use the product, won't click the buy button, or will simply leave.
Would this apply to software that runs oil refinery plants, or video games or an fighter jet flight stabilization systems?
Surely there is more to software than CRUD apps
Of course yes, and it's even easier in some cases. Since there's a language that defines the functionality (e.g: formal methods) that the agent can use/veriy against
Marketing and designers do not get more say in software. They get more say on the "surface", which we all know is 10% of the software.
Yes but that 10% is all that matter to the people that matter to the business. Like a car, most people care about how it looks and how they interact with it... the only people who care what is under the hood, for the most part, are other engineers.
“as long as it works” is doing a lot of work here. Did the people building it say “no, again” enough times, and at the right times, in order to make something that _actually_ works instead of _merely_ works?
It resonated with me too, and even as a once fairly prolific coder that now uses agents to do all the coding, I feel like this is all relevant and does matter. The agent does whatever you ask and provides thin judgements based on what it thinks is your motivation and context, even feeding it the context it will often make bad generic choices. I think this is the part hard to optimize because it's not a verifiable reward, it's the feel of the software. I think Herdr is a great example, I've tried several dozen terminal multiplexers / session aggregators and they are all vibed and different, but this one felt so much better to use because of its choices and actually increased the number of parallel sessions I was able to keep going. My own projects I find I have to stress every detail, that is what makes the software good now is really diving into it, the experience feels like just as much of a craft as coding was and 'taste' captures the concept for me.
For what it is worth, I appreciate you sharing your experience. Looks like you have more programming experience than I have in life, so your comment matters to me. It also gets rather close to something I wanted to evaluate in the post: "whether any real intuition or judgment went into [its] design". I think that's a big question to dwell on these days.
Ironically, though, I had written a post that had people debating whether I put any intuition or judgement into. Would've been real ironic to instead add a post-scriptum that said "Yep, none of it matters. I just slopped something in 5 minutes and it easily went to the frontpage. Look how easy it is!" but unfortunately that is not why I write, not what I intended to achieve, and not something I am equipped to do. I care about my work, which is why I care about your comment as well.
The LLM has its own intuition and judgement which at this point is quite good. I’m not just throwing that around, I use LLMs 12-14 hours a day and for a long time reviewed atleast 75% of the code.
Perhaps you're the one making it work well?
I've spent a day fixing a feature my very junior colleague pushed, and which was merged by my should-have-known-better colleagues who have almost as much experience as me.
We have access to the same models. Why did her version suck and my features don't need fixing?
There's still something there, thankfully.
I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?
People who care about their health aren't ignorant about that. I think that can apply to software too: if you care about safety or privacy you might think twice before using vibe-coded software.
it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers
https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd...
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"
That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei.
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.
> but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code
It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.
So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.
how about tools like Lovable ?
is Lovable used internally to create and improve Lovable product itself ?
A significant leap in logic is my middle name :) (I am not an AI)
Except AI corporations by and large all eat their own burgers (since any developer not leveraging agents effectively is woefully ignorant)
it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers
so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"
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
Also Microsoft couldn’t match Apple taste with effectively all resources in the world. And they really tried.
True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a modus operandi, a continuous process… those are harder to replicate.
It's not about being the only person doing it, it's about choosing to include it. Many don't know what works and what doesn't. Being able to discern a set of features that are cohesive to a smooth experience is taste. Innovating and establishing oneself as the first person to deliver those experiences is a moat in itself.
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.
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.
Right now we're all training AI models on our taste. All of our chat logs are being uploaded, and the AI companies are training the models on them to get them right the first time.
It will soon no longer require taste. Or at the very least be 95% of the way there on the first run.
This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked out.
Google also uses ML to train the Waymos, they just have better sensory capabilities. Lidar is much closer to how the human eye functions (inverted, I suppose) than cameras are anyway. But FSD is still really cool, you just have to make sure you don't take your hands off the wheel!
Judgment was all there ever was to begin with. It's why it's what God himself does, although I'd be curious if there are deities that don't involve judgment in some form.
Anyway, I completely agree and the past several years have been an absurd journey into borderline psychosis with some people.
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 agree with your criticism of "the good enough" and "done with taste" dichotomy.
I would like to comment on this, though:
> that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious.
I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve it: functions are simple, easy to reason about, properly named and composable.
It's the opposite of blunt, though, so it might be that you meant something else with the term "simple" :)
Perhaps it's... "simple to implement."
Usually it can be that the complex artifact is the simplest to implement. It's harder to make the simple thing
Classic, Rich Hicky, "simple made, easy" talk reference.
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.
Speaks more to the myopia of developers than anything else.
Most people in Comp Sci don’t read Kant unless they have a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, so I’m not blaming them.
I'm not only referring to that, I'm also referring to a reductionist view when I read "Taste Is All That's Left" - which is a statement that has been mindlessly parroted around as of late.
Why is it a reductionism view? A true reductionist will no doubt claim taste won't left as well, at least not as a non-private langauge.
Yeah even if Dev Schumer is some absurd hype artist he was correct to note that it is judgement and taste, not taste alone, that is most key now. Although he attributed it to the models own subjectivity.
Hume also has an essay about this. People don't read philosophy anymore. They think blog posts are just as good, or at least more "relevant", somehow.
Look I mean, many famous artists don't understand their work at all. You don't have to have read philosophy to create something meaningful or make an insightful comment. But if you are going to start using terms like Judgement or Taste, you really ought to know where they come from.
> 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.
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
Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.
I never quite fell for the scam of “designer who can’t photoshop”.
You can’t do product design without visual design - and many designers don’t. They’re picking from UI libraries like Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer could do, and many do. That’s why the job mostly died.
Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on should have good fundamentals. They’ve gone through the discipline and developed taste, they don’t choose it from a library.
The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting personal authority without proving or living anything. And that shows IMO.
My probably unpopular opinion is that using AI can be very creative and you can get into flow states, and the quality of outputs vary by skill of the user.
I have yet to see a good design falling out of people building flying castles in Figma, disconnected from the realities and basics of web development's languages HTML and CSS.
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.
How would you count them or even know if they were made with AI or not ? Such nonsense
You are using countless products that are built or have become maintained by AI without realizing it apparently.
Name them. Just 2! Any example would be enough.
Or well better than 0 and just a claim.
Mediocre is good enough, that's what it means.
Mediocre literally means middling, which may or may not be good enough depending on requirements.
I think you agree with what is in the essence of the post, but has been worded poorly. I do agree that most things are mediocre at best. Hell, I'd argue that most of my comments on everyday observations are negative. Ranging from "this sucks :/" to "holy fuck". They are, however, "good enough" for some and despite how clever I must to notice how much something sucks, that does nothing to the fact that it will receive adoption. Turns out I'm not clever. Huh.
In hindsight, I have worded this rather poorly and let some phrases do a lot of heavily lifting for me in the post. Ultimately, I agree with you. Knowing, for this instance, is not half the battle.
If you are waiting for someone else to make a good product for you with AI, you are missing out. The best AI products have userbase of one.
The best AI products have a userbase of one. The average AI product has a userbase of zero.
This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.
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.
They've updated the article to state that no LLM was used.
Yeah, I don't believe them.
It's only because you'd rather believe that you are being lied to than mistaken.
The update itself has strong AI tells:
> I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines—all of it. It’s just the way it is.
> That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it.
> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one
Either the author is doing this on purpose, or this is some kind of art project. I don’t buy the “just a coincidence” story at all.
Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all the comments taking this article seriously.
I think AI has broken HN. The readership is so head-in-the-sand about AI that they wouldn't recognize 2000 words of Claudeslop if it genuinely slapped them in the face
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).
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.
Absolutely not. Scarcity forces you to do with what you have. Only in abundance, only when you can have everything, you have room and reason to develop taste.
It is quite the opposite in my experience.
Who had historically the most taste? The rich or the poor? And who had the worst taste? The people who grew up in poverty mindset that got rich. These are widely shared, common cultural observations.
You need a long term, persistent abundance to develop and even have a use for taste.
I don't see why would software be any different.
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.
You've read many of them? Then you'd be the best to review even more of them! I'm ready for a raw and truthful review of my very own edition of the "taste" blog post, posted mere ~6 months ago, on the same topic: https://emsh.cat/en/good-taste/
Heh whoops. I thought my other comment didn’t post so I wrote this one instead.
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
yeah the skill du jour keeps shifting. Everyone wants to say they have something the llm doesn't. The more subjective and ill-defined that "something" is the better.
> Everyone wants to say they have something the llm doesn't.
LLM can't waste weeks debating stacks and tools and then recast the problem as a new framework that needs to exist.
*Check mate*
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."
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.
I think you missed the point of this article.
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.
> But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without reviews.
Why do you think orgs are pushing less reviews? Token-maxxing increased PRs but stupid meat brains are a constraint. So of course, remove that constraint and you’ll have your features faster!
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.
> later inspect them more carefully and understand why they're good
Reductionism is hard to apply to intuitions, and we often fool ourselves.
I personally call this the obviously test: smart people correctly notice something and say it is obvious. It is a rather rarer skill to understand and explain why. I have particularly noticed it with coaching (which adds the next levels of difficulty in getting someone to grok what you've seen).
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 couple of years data compression will have progressed so much that you ll be able to store all the data in the world on a floppy disk!
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> 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...?
> Doesn't that mean guaranteed failure in the market if you use taste as your guiding star?
If taste is maintainability, etc.. the no quite the opposite.
The startup that has no taste and vibecodes mindlessly might end up with a codebase they can't maintain or refactor. A product that can't advance.
But honestly, I don't feel like the toil is gone. Landing code in big projects remain hard.
Someone can replicate any high fashion piece of clothing you make by hand. Maybe they could even make it better. Buyers still care about the origin, just in a pretty small market for it.
Maybe software moves to this after it's commoditized? Users might prefer an artisanal one vs ordering it off the shelf or using an agent themselves.
Well, this has been true (to a lesser extent) for decades. See "Worse Is Better" and all the subsequent essays and writing following on from that
Going to drop this https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/. Tacit experience gives you taste in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's a pretty good direction to go down. I wonder if we can add a little more accounting to it. Cheap shoes solve an immediate problem but you pay more long term versus expensive well built ones. How much $ (in dev time + tokens) was spent in incidents and/or fixing code later. Credits and debits. Weigh money earned (somehow) against money spent.
Very well written, this gave me goosebumps. Full of flavor.
No! It’s garbage!
If you need a full length blog post to explain it, it's not a good use of the word.
The Rick Rubin meme
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
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 don't think it's entirely unreasonable to conclude AI can acquire what I have described, and would continue to defend as taste. The real question, then, could be whether its acquired taste renders you obsolete? So what if you can be replaced, what then? A question that popped into my mind is whether taste, as immeasurable as a metric as it is, would be what keeps you relevant just enough to matter.
Unpleasant as it would be, I think it may well render us obsolete in the main. There will probably always be a handful of paid human programmers around, just as there will probably always be a handful of people paid to make buggy whips, but the history of capitalism shows that most buyers don't care enough about how their goods and services get made to pay the premium that would keep "handmade" items economically viable for sellers. So I don't yet see a compelling reason why ~all of us programmers (and all other white collar workers in their turn) won't be replaced by LLMs.
The only difference I see between what happened to master craftsmen during the Industrial Revolution and what is happening to programmers today is that I belong to the latter group, so for the first time, the coming employment crisis feels personal.
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.
The author claims no AI was used.
He's lying.
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
It’s because the writing reads like AI slop, and the author’s note about how it’s not AI slop ALSO reads like AI slop
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.
Have you ever considered getting really good at one domain in particular?
i type code by hand
so emacs is also left :)
My non-dominant hand is also left.
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It's also just patently false. Taste is not all that is left. Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?
> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product?
Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.
We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand.
I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript function, automatically converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea. Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.
> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer).
It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.
Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.
This pretty much, Emacs, Sublime, Vim, Jetbrain’s IDE,… have snippet tooling solutions that are very configurable. And most unix editors support piping so you can easily write a programs for that. Or just a good old code generator.
My goal when writing a software is always to reach a point where modifying a business rule is as easy as writing it in plain english. Which means abstracting the essential complexity (while being pragmatic).
> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language
This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.
If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.
Spewing out tons of boilerplate has always been the hallmark of a bad engineer.
What is left? The second-best architecture for any given technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good enough.
When all else breaks, absurd() is your friend.
So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.
I think I am over opinion articles on AI, as a genre, in general.
Are you saying they are... tasteless?
> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either
Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not understand how genuine human people could think it good to "comment" like this.
There's just such a ridiculous pile on of people with such enormous overwhelming negativity underneath this ocmment. This off-gassing is almost never engaged with the material. Now there's an excuse to write off any material we don't like instantly, to accuse it of fakeness. But I still do not see a realness enscribed upon people who so actively work to tear down & prevent thought & consideration.
To engage with the post: I do think the definition of fashion is interesting, and a real power dynamic to be aware of. But do think there's a lot of things that take off in the world because they are good and interesting and nice, especially in technology and products, that the world wants nice things, and will happily support you for doing that. And especially in tech, the technical decisions we start from and build underfoot steer us towards success in subtle compounding ways, that matter, and that taste is crucial, where fashion is not a factor.
Again, at a meta level: my distress & frustration at the top is less from seeing this comment, and far more from seeing everything down thread trying to out-do one another with how cynical and anti-meaning anti-trying they can be. But I think this post definitely started on an all too familiar note, blood in the HN waters that all too often gets us so sharky.
IMO giving "benefit of the doubt" to something beyond doubt is bad, straight up. If someone can't tell this article is AI then they need to go spend an hour a day reading known AI writing vs known human writing until they develop the skill; the voice of this author SCREAMS AI.
I'm a firm believer in not engaging with or promoting the content of misrepresented AI.
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would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account