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Comments (99)

• hellojomp
  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..."
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  mdwelsh
  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.
• pnathan
  > 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.
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  GrayHerring
  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.
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  jauntywundrkind
  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 argumentBut 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
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  purplemoonx
  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
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  DiscourseFan
  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.
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  jopsen
  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.
• dcre
  This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.
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  DrBrock
  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.
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  brap
  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
• trjordan
  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."
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  dcre
  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.
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  madprops
  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.
• gaigalas
  If you need a full length blog post to explain it, it's not a good use of the word.
• grey-area
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• hahahaa
  Going to drop this https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/. Tacit experience gives you taste in my opinion.
• socketcluster
  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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  cobertos
  > 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...?
• anon
  undefined
• bluegatty
  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.
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  onion2k
  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.
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  raver1975
  Very well written, this gave me goosebumps. Full of flavor.
• anon
  undefined
• AndrewKemendo
  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 itI’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
• drekipus
  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
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  mrtesthah
  Pangram classifies 100% of this text as AI-generated.
• choutianxius
  The Rick Rubin meme
• Hasz
  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.
• kimjune01
  would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account
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  whateveracct
  i type code by handso emacs is also left :)
• Jtarii
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  amberjack
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  TacticalCoder
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  jazzpush2
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