6 ms·

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and th

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. Except that I can't fully externalize myself. Debugging a system takes more resources than running the system. If I could write down everything I know and hand it to a machine, I'd do that, but it impossible. People aren't books or hashmaps. If you want to build something, you need to use the tools, not teach the tools to use you. [edit: I'm trying to figure out if there's something to be done about this. Email me if you want to chat -- tr at tern dot sh]

bonzini 3mo ago
It can't be written down as code, that's the point. I am more familiar with taste in coding and it can at best be described—that the resulting code is too subtly different from something else in the codebase, that you're masking a different bug, that you're not following what the code tells you. The good part is that while this cannot be unit tested, you can write documentation and code comments about it that tell people what they need to know. But for taste of the kind described in the article there's not even a definition. The logic ended up being "trust a bunch of opaque weights the most"
- Chris2048 3mo ago
  Technically, AI is code, just very complex code. I'd say there are "simple" simple things you can do though, like take automated screenshots and detect colours for jarring colourschemes.
  - Chris2048 3mo ago
    Must have hit some nerves.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Apple's human interface guidelines says that some things can be written down though. It's a very thurough look at UX and while they don't adhere to them perfectly themselves, it's very much a north star to a some ideals. You can't unit test for taste, but you can integration test that bad tastes haven't happened.
  - sscaryterry 3mo ago
    I think Apple lost a bit of credibility after the round-corner fiasco that still persists on Tahoe.
    - computomatic 3mo ago
      Wasn’t it introduced on Tahoe? (Perhaps my memory is failing me here.) Do you mean it still persists on Golden Gate? They seem to have addressed the majority of issues I heard about - unless you mean the issue is that rounded corners exist at all.
      - sscaryterry 3mo ago
        See: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-developers-fix-for-macos-26-s-corners-a28844a0974d https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope...
        trumpdong 3mo ago
        AI written article with two fullscreen popups?
    - InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
      They wrote the HIG before Alan came in and trashed the place.
      - sscaryterry 3mo ago
        Indeed, I'm sure Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
        vkou 3mo ago
        Steve Jobs was also responsible for brilliant bits of usability like puck mice, and the need to have two functioning hands in order to right-click.
delichon 3mo ago
You may be able to effectively externalize taste by "hot or not" style pair testing. Enough comparisons and I'd expect ML to be able to mimic human taste by latching on to features we're not well aware of influencing us.
- trjordan 3mo ago
  This is RL, right? Like, this is exactly why models have mostly converged around obvious style, because we train them literally on thumbs-up/thumbs-down data of what good behavior and good code looks like. And that's why it's so hard to get a model to reproduce the specific taste of a person or an organization. My taste is different than yours, so if we dump our aggregate preferences into RL, in averages out to nothing interesting. For the code-writing case, this means you end up reviewing every line of code, looking for places where you'd thumbs-down the code. Not every line of code contains a real decision, though, so it feels like a waste of time.
  - paytonjjones 3mo ago
    This is, in short, the big current problem with AI. LLMs are built for scale so they've given up on the kind of online learning / "long term memory" processes that would individualize them. The LLM is permanently locked to being a really cracked engineer on their first day at your company, looking at your codebase for the first time. You can scaffold a bit with .md files, but at the moment they lack the ability to do what humans do: go to sleep, encode things from short to long term memory, and wake up the next day with more specific knowledge baked in.
    - trjordan 3mo ago
      100%. The problem with them isn't making sure they're doing the right thing, it's making sure they're not making bad assumptions. IMHO this is where code review goes until we fix the individualized model thing: you need to review the decisions the agent made, where you didn't steer. Most will be right. A few will be disastrously wrong. But decision-by-decision is a lot less to review than line-by-line of code.
sigbottle 3mo ago
Exactly. Every single philosophical statement in history runs up against the issue where you can just say, "yeah, it's pretty much this. You just need to do <arbitrarily hard unspecified thing that is basically unfalsifiability>". (Including this one) And maybe that's just our limits with philosophy, modeling, assumptions, whatever. The danger is not realizing when we're in that zone. (Fwiw I think unfalsifiability is a limit with any system - "you didn't compile in my syntax/semantics" is an gotcha that's actually valid and useful, but nobody can really determine the hard line)
giancarlostoro 3mo ago
What's kind of funny is this is how I implemented "gates" for the ticketing system I built for Claude, because Beads would just close tickets without validation. I have tickets that are literally "Human validation" tier, so it will work on the next available thing until I personally tell the model to close it. So, in that spirit, yeah, you can unit test for taste, if you implement external validation. Unit test runs, waits for human input before passing or failing, which might seem out of the norm, but we already have QA do manual testing.
tmoertel 3mo ago
> You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. I'm not so sure. For instance, you can write down what it means for a program to be free of XSS and other injection vulnerabilities. Now, how would you unit test for that property?
pydry 3mo ago
I remember reading an interview with a fireman who described a time when his buddy evacuated a team because he "felt" that a floor would collapse imminently. He couldn't articulate why but they trusted his gut and it did collapse. A lot of software engineering relies on that kind of intuition and on a good team you can integrate it and benefit from it and avoid all manner of floor collapses.
- dyarosla 3mo ago
  To play devil’s advocate, intuition is still a physical response to stimuli mixed with knowledge of past experience. Hypothetically it could be modeled- the problem here comes down to how to encode it.
  - sigbottle 3mo ago
    "Encoding" implies some GOFAI symbolic formal rule machinery. I'd argue that transformers are a pretty good indication that intelligence isn't "encodable" in the way we think it means. Usually, most "model" vocabulary means that we can explain and constrain the "data" from the "rules". Except the mere "data" is trillions of interacting weights. That may be encoding in a physical sense, but that still doesn't explain the intuition in any legible way to humans. Cynically, we've been able to encode everything already by just saying everything's a transition in a huge lookup table. Not very informative though.
punnerud 3mo ago
If you have enough examples you can train an AI on your preferences, then use that distilled AI as a unit test. Don’t combine multiple into one AI. If they don’t agree you want it to fail so you can decide and retrain the tests.
Dumblydorr 3mo ago
Randomized trial. Half of them pledge to use AI freely and liberally, half of them to never use it, compare via surveys and off-AI tests after X months. Could even flip it so then the non-users used it for X months and vice versa, see if losses/gains are stable.
eithed 3mo ago
I agree and indeed externalize everything you know *that matters*. Want to follow certain pattern, or convention - define it, ie active record vs repository pattern, stick is as an ADR! You don't know what you want? Look at what Claude produces and then acquire taste, mark this as convetion that future sessions will follow, but stick to *one* convention! Treat your LLMs as junior developers willing to apply various patterns willy nilly, caring only about fulfilling the ACs of given task and not about the longevity or well being of the system in general. They will not look at bigger picture to check if given pattern applies globally, or even if there are any other patterns.
deadbabe 3mo ago
You cannot externalize taste. You could perhaps mimic someone’s taste, but that’s not the taste. Knowing the taste requires actually tasting it. You can’t capture the taste, it’s already gone.
- cindyllm 3mo ago
  [dead]
jimmypk 3mo ago
[flagged]
petra 3mo ago
Is there an issue of taste when generating images with AI ? or can we relatively rapidly train people to generate beautiful images with decent amount of variety ?
- nemomarx 3mo ago
  ai generated images and art still seem to look cheap or untasteful to a lot of viewers, so it can't be that easy to train people on fixing that.
fny 3mo ago
You absolutely cannot unit test for taste. I had this experience doing a port from Big Query to Postgres using Opus. I had unit tests to guarantee parity with the original code, and Opus insisted on building this bespoke query builder (e.g. `def _where(very_complicated_params)`) on top of sqlglot. Even with the original code being straightforward and legible and repeated instructions to match, I had to fight with it to get close. In the end, I ended up doing things the "old fashion way" where I copied chunks code into Claude proper and gave explicit instructions for each piece. I clearly had externalized the requirements, and yet that wasn't sufficient. The only way to unit test further would be to use an AST to evaluate the output against metrics I couldn't even encode.
ElevenLathe 3mo ago
The bigger problem I have as a worker is that, once I externalize it (by writing a skill or whatever), it becomes a work-for-hire whose copyright is owned by my employer. Technically this is true of a few other things I do for work, like my .emacs and .bashrc files, small scripts I keep in ~/bin on my workstation, etc., but no employer cares to assert this unless they're being assholes for some unrelated reason. Agent skill files, especially ones that seem to semi-reliably do what they say on the tin (the white whale!), are not like that at all, and I can see them pursuing you if you try to use them at a future employer.
- hammock 3mo ago
  This is a solid point and the only answer to it I can think of is that execution is 99x harder than ideas. Even if you enumerate everything someone else trying to use it is still going to muck it up
vinay_ys 3mo ago
You can externalize the things you consider as taste by writing down generalized statements, but those statements need boundary conditions and exceptions to be also specified. Except, exceptions have exceptions and when to apply the rule vs when to use exception is contextual judgement. so, whatever residual that cannot be explicitly and unambiguously and generally spelled out, we call it as taste/judgement.
lukan 3mo ago
" I'm trying to figure out if there's something to be done about this." Yes, it is called accepting the concept of "good enough". If you go for perfection, with the help of AI or not - you will never be done, at least not if your concept of perfect is like mine. And more concretely here, well you can feed the LLM with enough context about you, so it can better guess what you want. And in some years maybe use a brain computer interface. But I doubt there is a magic bullet here. Just better tools, that we can build. But they won't be perfect either (hard for me to write that, as I set out building the perfect tools).
joshka 3mo ago
Pattern language sites / books have existed for years. The right approach is more work out what shared patterns are, make sure a bunch of reasonable ones are post trained into the models so that it's easy to refer to them by name (e.g. "tim pope / chris beams style commit messages", or "make invalid state unrepresentable") and then you're in a world where you can define your personal tasted through labels rather than repetition of the core arguments.
- RossBencina 3mo ago
  But pattern languages don't encode taste they encode known working solutions. Making invalid state unrepresentable is not a matter of taste it's a best practice.
coldtea 3mo ago
>You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. If you can externalize it, you only captured the small part of taste that can be externalized in concrete rules. You can of course pretend anything else doesn't exist, like a person denying anything that can't be measured by their instruments.
cadamsdotcom 3mo ago
Emailed!
zenpe 3mo ago
[flagged]
tripzilch 3mo ago
> You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. > Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. First you have to have it, and if you think this is a tasteful solution, then you didn't.
xboxnolifes 3mo ago
This problem predates AI. If we could externalize such a fickle thing such as good taste it wouldn't be such a valuable skill. And God have people tried. Golden ratios, style guides, naming rules, linters, formatters, templates, margin ratios, color palettes, and on and on and on. And yet here we are. We can quantize some of the basics, and make a not half bad style guide, but we'll never be able to fully actualize a set of rules to match what humans find generally tasteful. Its too contextual and a moving target.
playorizaya 3mo ago
[dead]

bonzini 3mo ago

It can't be written down as code, that's the point. I am more familiar with taste in coding and it can at best be described—that the resulting code is too subtly different from something else in the codebase, that you're masking a different bug, that you're not following what the code tells you. The good part is that while this cannot be unit tested, you can write documentation and code comments about it that tell people what they need to know. But for taste of the kind described in the article there's not even a definition. The logic ended up being "trust a bunch of opaque weights the most"

Chris2048 3mo ago
Technically, AI is code, just very complex code. I'd say there are "simple" simple things you can do though, like take automated screenshots and detect colours for jarring colourschemes.
- Chris2048 3mo ago
  Must have hit some nerves.
fragmede 3mo ago
Apple's human interface guidelines says that some things can be written down though. It's a very thurough look at UX and while they don't adhere to them perfectly themselves, it's very much a north star to a some ideals. You can't unit test for taste, but you can integration test that bad tastes haven't happened.
- sscaryterry 3mo ago
  I think Apple lost a bit of credibility after the round-corner fiasco that still persists on Tahoe.
  - computomatic 3mo ago
    Wasn’t it introduced on Tahoe? (Perhaps my memory is failing me here.) Do you mean it still persists on Golden Gate? They seem to have addressed the majority of issues I heard about - unless you mean the issue is that rounded corners exist at all.
    - sscaryterry 3mo ago
      See: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-developers-fix-for-macos-26-s-corners-a28844a0974d https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope...
      - trumpdong 3mo ago
        AI written article with two fullscreen popups?
  - InsideOutSanta 3mo ago
    They wrote the HIG before Alan came in and trashed the place.
    - sscaryterry 3mo ago
      Indeed, I'm sure Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
      - vkou 3mo ago
        Steve Jobs was also responsible for brilliant bits of usability like puck mice, and the need to have two functioning hands in order to right-click.

delichon 3mo ago

You may be able to effectively externalize taste by "hot or not" style pair testing. Enough comparisons and I'd expect ML to be able to mimic human taste by latching on to features we're not well aware of influencing us.

trjordan 3mo ago
This is RL, right? Like, this is exactly why models have mostly converged around obvious style, because we train them literally on thumbs-up/thumbs-down data of what good behavior and good code looks like. And that's why it's so hard to get a model to reproduce the specific taste of a person or an organization. My taste is different than yours, so if we dump our aggregate preferences into RL, in averages out to nothing interesting. For the code-writing case, this means you end up reviewing every line of code, looking for places where you'd thumbs-down the code. Not every line of code contains a real decision, though, so it feels like a waste of time.
- paytonjjones 3mo ago
  This is, in short, the big current problem with AI. LLMs are built for scale so they've given up on the kind of online learning / "long term memory" processes that would individualize them. The LLM is permanently locked to being a really cracked engineer on their first day at your company, looking at your codebase for the first time. You can scaffold a bit with .md files, but at the moment they lack the ability to do what humans do: go to sleep, encode things from short to long term memory, and wake up the next day with more specific knowledge baked in.
  - trjordan 3mo ago
    100%. The problem with them isn't making sure they're doing the right thing, it's making sure they're not making bad assumptions. IMHO this is where code review goes until we fix the individualized model thing: you need to review the decisions the agent made, where you didn't steer. Most will be right. A few will be disastrously wrong. But decision-by-decision is a lot less to review than line-by-line of code.

sigbottle 3mo ago

Exactly. Every single philosophical statement in history runs up against the issue where you can just say, "yeah, it's pretty much this. You just need to do <arbitrarily hard unspecified thing that is basically unfalsifiability>". (Including this one) And maybe that's just our limits with philosophy, modeling, assumptions, whatever. The danger is not realizing when we're in that zone. (Fwiw I think unfalsifiability is a limit with any system - "you didn't compile in my syntax/semantics" is an gotcha that's actually valid and useful, but nobody can really determine the hard line)

giancarlostoro 3mo ago

What's kind of funny is this is how I implemented "gates" for the ticketing system I built for Claude, because Beads would just close tickets without validation. I have tickets that are literally "Human validation" tier, so it will work on the next available thing until I personally tell the model to close it. So, in that spirit, yeah, you can unit test for taste, if you implement external validation. Unit test runs, waits for human input before passing or failing, which might seem out of the norm, but we already have QA do manual testing.

tmoertel 3mo ago

> You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. I'm not so sure. For instance, you can write down what it means for a program to be free of XSS and other injection vulnerabilities. Now, how would you unit test for that property?

pydry 3mo ago

I remember reading an interview with a fireman who described a time when his buddy evacuated a team because he "felt" that a floor would collapse imminently. He couldn't articulate why but they trusted his gut and it did collapse. A lot of software engineering relies on that kind of intuition and on a good team you can integrate it and benefit from it and avoid all manner of floor collapses.

dyarosla 3mo ago
To play devil’s advocate, intuition is still a physical response to stimuli mixed with knowledge of past experience. Hypothetically it could be modeled- the problem here comes down to how to encode it.
- sigbottle 3mo ago
  "Encoding" implies some GOFAI symbolic formal rule machinery. I'd argue that transformers are a pretty good indication that intelligence isn't "encodable" in the way we think it means. Usually, most "model" vocabulary means that we can explain and constrain the "data" from the "rules". Except the mere "data" is trillions of interacting weights. That may be encoding in a physical sense, but that still doesn't explain the intuition in any legible way to humans. Cynically, we've been able to encode everything already by just saying everything's a transition in a huge lookup table. Not very informative though.

punnerud 3mo ago

If you have enough examples you can train an AI on your preferences, then use that distilled AI as a unit test. Don’t combine multiple into one AI. If they don’t agree you want it to fail so you can decide and retrain the tests.

Dumblydorr 3mo ago

Randomized trial. Half of them pledge to use AI freely and liberally, half of them to never use it, compare via surveys and off-AI tests after X months. Could even flip it so then the non-users used it for X months and vice versa, see if losses/gains are stable.

eithed 3mo ago

I agree and indeed externalize everything you know *that matters*. Want to follow certain pattern, or convention - define it, ie active record vs repository pattern, stick is as an ADR! You don't know what you want? Look at what Claude produces and then acquire taste, mark this as convetion that future sessions will follow, but stick to *one* convention! Treat your LLMs as junior developers willing to apply various patterns willy nilly, caring only about fulfilling the ACs of given task and not about the longevity or well being of the system in general. They will not look at bigger picture to check if given pattern applies globally, or even if there are any other patterns.

deadbabe 3mo ago

You cannot externalize taste. You could perhaps mimic someone’s taste, but that’s not the taste. Knowing the taste requires actually tasting it. You can’t capture the taste, it’s already gone.

cindyllm 3mo ago
[dead]

jimmypk 3mo ago

[flagged]

petra 3mo ago

Is there an issue of taste when generating images with AI ? or can we relatively rapidly train people to generate beautiful images with decent amount of variety ?

nemomarx 3mo ago
ai generated images and art still seem to look cheap or untasteful to a lot of viewers, so it can't be that easy to train people on fixing that.

fny 3mo ago

You absolutely cannot unit test for taste. I had this experience doing a port from Big Query to Postgres using Opus. I had unit tests to guarantee parity with the original code, and Opus insisted on building this bespoke query builder (e.g. `def _where(very_complicated_params)`) on top of sqlglot. Even with the original code being straightforward and legible and repeated instructions to match, I had to fight with it to get close. In the end, I ended up doing things the "old fashion way" where I copied chunks code into Claude proper and gave explicit instructions for each piece. I clearly had externalized the requirements, and yet that wasn't sufficient. The only way to unit test further would be to use an AST to evaluate the output against metrics I couldn't even encode.

ElevenLathe 3mo ago

The bigger problem I have as a worker is that, once I externalize it (by writing a skill or whatever), it becomes a work-for-hire whose copyright is owned by my employer. Technically this is true of a few other things I do for work, like my .emacs and .bashrc files, small scripts I keep in ~/bin on my workstation, etc., but no employer cares to assert this unless they're being assholes for some unrelated reason. Agent skill files, especially ones that seem to semi-reliably do what they say on the tin (the white whale!), are not like that at all, and I can see them pursuing you if you try to use them at a future employer.

hammock 3mo ago
This is a solid point and the only answer to it I can think of is that execution is 99x harder than ideas. Even if you enumerate everything someone else trying to use it is still going to muck it up

vinay_ys 3mo ago

You can externalize the things you consider as taste by writing down generalized statements, but those statements need boundary conditions and exceptions to be also specified. Except, exceptions have exceptions and when to apply the rule vs when to use exception is contextual judgement. so, whatever residual that cannot be explicitly and unambiguously and generally spelled out, we call it as taste/judgement.

lukan 3mo ago

" I'm trying to figure out if there's something to be done about this." Yes, it is called accepting the concept of "good enough". If you go for perfection, with the help of AI or not - you will never be done, at least not if your concept of perfect is like mine. And more concretely here, well you can feed the LLM with enough context about you, so it can better guess what you want. And in some years maybe use a brain computer interface. But I doubt there is a magic bullet here. Just better tools, that we can build. But they won't be perfect either (hard for me to write that, as I set out building the perfect tools).

joshka 3mo ago

Pattern language sites / books have existed for years. The right approach is more work out what shared patterns are, make sure a bunch of reasonable ones are post trained into the models so that it's easy to refer to them by name (e.g. "tim pope / chris beams style commit messages", or "make invalid state unrepresentable") and then you're in a world where you can define your personal tasted through labels rather than repetition of the core arguments.

RossBencina 3mo ago
But pattern languages don't encode taste they encode known working solutions. Making invalid state unrepresentable is not a matter of taste it's a best practice.

coldtea 3mo ago

>You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. If you can externalize it, you only captured the small part of taste that can be externalized in concrete rules. You can of course pretend anything else doesn't exist, like a person denying anything that can't be measured by their instruments.

cadamsdotcom 3mo ago

Emailed!

zenpe 3mo ago

[flagged]

tripzilch 3mo ago

> You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. > Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. First you have to have it, and if you think this is a tasteful solution, then you didn't.

xboxnolifes 3mo ago

This problem predates AI. If we could externalize such a fickle thing such as good taste it wouldn't be such a valuable skill. And God have people tried. Golden ratios, style guides, naming rules, linters, formatters, templates, margin ratios, color palettes, and on and on and on. And yet here we are. We can quantize some of the basics, and make a not half bad style guide, but we'll never be able to fully actualize a set of rules to match what humans find generally tasteful. Its too contextual and a moving target.

playorizaya 3mo ago

[dead]