13 ms·

Taste Is All That's Left

• DiscourseFan 1mo ago
  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.
  • FLeXMurphy 1mo ago
    Speaks more to the myopia of developers than anything else.
    • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
      Most people in Comp Sci don’t read Kant unless they have a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, so I’m not blaming them.
      • FLeXMurphy 1mo ago
        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.
        • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
          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.
        • asdewqqwer 1mo ago
          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.
  • eudamoniac 1mo ago
    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.
    • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
      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.
    • soundworlds 1mo ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I have personally found most philosophy "classics" painfully hard to get into. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be respected, but the truth is that sections of society (like myself) do rely on the people specializing in philosophy parsing it into current language and metaphor.
      • eudamoniac 1mo ago
        Truth is hard to get into. If it were simple and digestible, we wouldn't all keep seeking it, ever hungry for it... It has to be grappled with. You can't shake truth's hand and have a seat and have it flow into you smoothly from the latest self help book.
  • red75prime 1mo ago
    Shouldn't this 236-year-old paper be updated in accordance with, say, neuroeconomics research on how provenance influences aesthetic taste?
    • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
      That would be a posteriori, and thus not a claim about cognition but a claim about individual minds
      • red75prime 1mo ago
        Philosophers are still considering it possible to infer things about aesthetic taste a priory? Good luck, I guess.
  • p0nce 1mo ago
    Nor the work of sociologists like Bourdieu's Distinction.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• archeantus 1mo ago
  Great read. Ironic that he cited Pirsig because I think that reading ZATAOMM was the last time that I experienced this type of writing that made me pause and think deeply about what I just read.
• smileduck 1mo ago
  Taste begins where measurement ends.
• bmmayer1 1mo ago
  This reads similar to this from April: https://cokiehasiotis.substack.com/p/a-matter-of-taste-issue-014 https://cokiehasiotis.substack.com/p/a-matter-of-taste-issue... Quoth Cokie: "When everyone has the same brush, the only variable left is the hand."
• visarga 1mo ago
  my idea is "skin is all that's left"
• TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • kunai 1mo ago
    > Who the FUCK speaks like that? Walter Hartwell White, I suppose.
  • jasonlotito 1mo ago
    > Who the FUCK speaks like that? It's a blog post. It was written. The written word is different from the spoken. People don't speak like: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. People don't speak like: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. In fact, I can throw this question at you: "TFA's title is" Who the FUCK speaks like that? Who the FUCK uses TFA's IRL OMG WTF? Silly, isn't it?
    • yifanl 1mo ago
      [flagged]
      • RickS 1mo ago
        Even if they didn't make a fair point (and I think they do), I would prefer their pedantry to your palpable contempt by a large margin. I mean "palpable" literally. My body is tenser and my heart more sad having experienced the voice you just used on that person.
        • pessimizer 1mo ago
          I miss when people used to hide emotional fragility, and not publicly brag about being physically and emotionally devastated by an HN comment.
          • recursive 1mo ago
            Please be nostalgic somewhere else.
• cobertos 1mo ago
  > 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...?
  • mister_mort 1mo ago
    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
  • nemomarx 1mo ago
    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.
  • jopsen 1mo ago
    > 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.
• jauntywundrkind 1mo ago
  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 https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h
• hellojomp 1mo ago
  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..."
  • notashelf 1mo ago
    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.
  • dbtc 1mo ago
    "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.
    • psadri 1mo ago
      This is an awesome thread. I agree - the catalyst is joy, in a broad sense of the word. One is lucky to find joy in something that can take you deep.
  • relativeadv 1mo ago
    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.
• purplemoonx 1mo ago
  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
  • notpushkin 1mo ago
    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.
    • purplemoonx 1mo ago
      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.
  • zelphirkalt 1mo ago
    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.
  • 1mo ago
• trjordan 1mo ago
  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."
• dcre 1mo ago
  This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.
• dcre 1mo ago
  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.
  • GeorgeOldfield 1mo ago
    pangram v4 model says 100% of this article was LLM-generated. pangram v4 reports a 0.0041% false-positive rate (~1 in 24,000 human texts) and a 0.3396% false-negative rate (~1 in 294 AI texts) and i also think it was AI generated
  • dcre 1mo ago
    Heh whoops. I thought my other comment didn’t post so I wrote this one instead.
  • embedding-shape 1mo ago
    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/ https://emsh.cat/en/good-taste/
    • dcre 1mo ago
      Ha! I have a heterodox view on the taste thing, which is that it’s mostly cope: the models apply something like taste in nearly everything they do, and these taste posts will disappear as that becomes more obvious. However, besides the substantive disagreement, I think your post is fine since it appears to be your actual point of view, written down by hand. It’s not particularly novel or insightful (most of these takes are basically “there are still some things the models can’t do” — no shit!) but it’s measured and reasonable. Fine.
• grey-area 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• kimjune01 1mo ago
  would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account
• Jtarii 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• jazzpush2 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • hbn 1mo ago
    Intentional anonymity is perfectly tasteful.
    • shimman 1mo ago
      Yeah but everything else on their site screams LLM-slop. It's not unique or special, it's literally the same cookie cutter startup design of the last 15 years.
    • jazzpush2 1mo ago
      'Intentional anonymity is perfectly tasteful.' - what? This statement is exactly the kind of hollow, meaningless fluff that gets passed around as wisdom, but means nothing. Taste is not the act, it's how the act is done.
  • draw_down 1mo ago
    [dead]
• mdwelsh 1mo ago
  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.
  • devin 1mo ago
    “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?
  • hellojomp 1mo ago
    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?
    • stabbles 1mo ago
      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.
    • bijowo1676 1mo ago
      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"
    • bijowo1676 1mo ago
      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/mcdonalds_ceo_chris_kempczinski_goes_viral_after/ 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"
• GrayHerring 1mo ago
  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.
  • satvikpendem 1mo ago
    Mediocre is good enough, that's what it means.
    • davidivadavid 1mo ago
      Mediocre literally means middling, which may or may not be good enough depending on requirements.
  • jatora 1mo ago
    You are using countless products that are built or have become maintained by AI without realizing it apparently.
    • Krei-se 1mo ago
      Name them. Just 2! Any example would be enough. Or well better than 0 and just a claim.
      • hexedpackets 1mo ago
        We can only guess what products you use, but I'll take a stab by naming some big ones: Spotify - https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-developers-havent-written-a-line-of-code-since-december-thanks-to-ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve... Netflix - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/netflix-all-in-on-leveraging-ai-in-its-streaming-platform.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/netflix-all-in-on-leveraging... Stripe - https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-... Discord - https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-ai https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...
• brap 1mo ago
  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
  • chasd00 1mo ago
    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.
    • benoau 1mo ago
      > 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*
  • kingkongjaffa 1mo ago
    I used to think the average HN reader probably did have good taste, at least above average. After all HN is a place for builders, making things. Most people never make anything. Making things means deciding what to make and how it should be, and also what not to make instead, so I think charitably HN probably does have higher average taste than random people or most other web forums.
• amberjack 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • causal 1mo ago
    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?
    • sparkling 1mo ago
      What is left? The second-best architecture for any given technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good enough.
      • Krei-se 1mo ago
        When all else breaks, absurd() is your friend. So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.
    • dvt 1mo ago
      > 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.
      • pydry 1mo ago
        Spewing out tons of boilerplate has always been the hallmark of a bad engineer.
      • inigyou 1mo ago
        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.
• choutianxius 1mo ago
  The Rick Rubin meme
  • anupamk 1mo ago
    Oof :) The irony of OP championing for “taste” in the age of mass produced slop, only to then post something that was likely produced by repeatedly reprompting with “no, again”
• onion2k 1mo ago
  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.
  • qsera 1mo ago
    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!
• madprops 1mo ago
  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.
  • robocat 1mo ago
    > 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).
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• bluegatty 1mo ago
  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.
• whateveracct 1mo ago
  i type code by hand so emacs is also left :)
  • inigyou 1mo ago
    My non-dominant hand is also left.
• Hasz 1mo ago
  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.
  • andyg_blog 1mo ago
    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.
  • lackoftactics 1mo ago
    That could be true for novel problems from Deep Tech industries and not everybody can solve those. If you are doing another app, the product experience and marketing will probably win. Many companies with better products lost, beaten to death example is Betamax
• raver1975 1mo ago
  Very well written, this gave me goosebumps. Full of flavor.
  • dcre 1mo ago
    No! It’s garbage!
    • raver1975 1mo ago
      You're not my supervisor.
• DrBrock 1mo ago
  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.
  • vor_ 1mo ago
    They've updated the article to state that no LLM was used.
    • Seattle3503 1mo ago
      Yeah, I don't believe them.
      • scotty79 1mo ago
        It's only because you'd rather believe that you are being lied to than mistaken.
        • grey-area 1mo ago
          No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that LLMs excel in producing. Either they used an LLM or they have no taste and have used LLMs far too much elsewhere.
          • scotty79 1mo ago
            > No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that LLMs excel in producing. Author does not dispute that. Yet they claim to not use AI. So your preferred belief is that they are lying, rather than a thing that looks AI written might have been actually written by a human and you are wrong thinking that it can't be true in this case.
• hahahaa 1mo ago
  Going to drop this https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/ https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-series/. Tacit experience gives you taste in my opinion.
• pnathan 1mo ago
  > 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.
• socketcluster 1mo ago
  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.
  • dimgl 1mo ago
    > I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI generated codebases really fall apart. It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be solved in the future, but I'm also really disappointed with how many people really do not care about writing high-quality software that is easy to understand, performant, and resilient to bugs. Like, why did you decide to work on software in the first place? I think we're going to see some pretty careless mistakes in the future that will result in a lot of pain...
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• drekipus 1mo ago
  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
  • deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
• AndrewKemendo 1mo ago
  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
  • jdanford 1mo ago
    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
• jopsen 1mo ago
  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.
  • cautiouscat 1mo ago
    > 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!
    • jopsen 1mo ago
      Software engineering is and has always involved engineering situations where you can let your co-workers/third-parties run wild with limited review oversight and limited blast radius. Example: a plugin architecture with a solid API that makes degenerate behavior limited to usages of said plugin.
• mrtesthah 1mo ago
  Pangram classifies 100% of this text as AI-generated.
  • vor_ 1mo ago
    The author claims no AI was used.
    • ryeights 1mo ago
      He's lying.
  • kuschku 1mo ago
    I disagree. It has none of the rhythm of AI generated text. Even humans that copy AI patterns adopt the AI rhythm at least on smaller scale. But this follows human structure and rhythm through and through, whether on the level of sentences, paragraphs, sections, or the whole text. I'd say it's handwritten.
• gaigalas 1mo ago
  If you need a full length blog post to explain it, it's not a good use of the word.
• jdzikowski 1mo ago
  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.
  • scotty79 1mo ago
    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.
    • devin 1mo ago
      It is quite the opposite in my experience.
      • scotty79 1mo ago
        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.
        • deleted 1mo ago
          [deleted]
• abixb 1mo ago
  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.
  • asdfman123 1mo ago
    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.
    • KerrAvon 1mo ago
      This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked out.
      • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
        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!
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
• erelong 1mo ago
  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.
  • devin 1mo ago
    I think you missed the point of this article.
• catigula 1mo ago
  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.
  • jdanford 1mo ago
    Have you ever considered getting really good at one domain in particular?
• boron1006 1mo ago
  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.
  • nemomarx 1mo ago
    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?
    • a123b456c 1mo ago
      Prompting is a skill.
    • neerajsi 1mo ago
      In my recent experience it seems to be a contextual issue. Llms are constantly being dropped into new situations where they have to rediscover high level and cross cutting information about the system they're working on from contextual clues. The internal representations of this state and its projection back out to human language wouldn't be as concise as that of a practitioner or team that develop their own verbiage and ontology over time molded to their system. This verbosity might get better as we figure out better ways for agents to learn long term and use that knowledge to adapt to the users and projects over time. There might also be some good harness improvements we could consider like forked output streams or multiple long lived filter subagents to ensure that output appropriate for thinking is separate from code output and separate from output given to the user driving the session.
  • ryoshu 1mo ago
    I like judgement. Taste is a subset.
• SpicyLemonZest 1mo ago
  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.
• akoboldfrying 1mo ago
  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 https://www.jamesshore.com/Articles/Quality-With-a-Name.html
  • notashelf 1mo ago
    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.
    • akoboldfrying 1mo ago
      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.
• madrox 1mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
  • derangedHorse 1mo ago
    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.
    • nullbio 1mo ago
      Competitors can reproduce your discernment as well, it's the sum of your product and can be equally cloned. So how is this a moat?
      • dingaling 1mo ago
        Because reproduction is reactive. If an organisation only clones others' style then they'll always be behind the curve and will be widely recognised to be derivative and lacking their own 'taste'. Look how long it takes Chinese brands to transition from being clones to establishing their own corporate image.
  • dmarcos 1mo ago
    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.
• cowboylowrez 1mo ago
  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.
• asdewqqwer 1mo ago
  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).
  • kingkongjaffa 1mo ago
    AI does have something like Aesthetics and taste, but it's the average of all the inputs and so it's almost by definition the answer to 'what is the most average design possible based on all human prior data inputs?' That's why AI prototypes of front end UIs tend to look the same without massaging them with your own design tokens, design language, and injecting your own taste.
    • asdewqqwer 1mo ago
      read a book.
• easygenes 1mo ago
  Oof, even the post-mortem promising none of it is AI slop is obvious AI slop.
  • attheballot 1mo ago
    I was expecting them to state that they were doing a bit with the post-mortem, but the punchline never came. It is even more consistently AI coded than the full text. Give us a /s, give us a wink a nod, give us a markdown sygil of LOSS.png, anything that says "I am actually a human", because all that reads as is BEEP BOOP KILL ALL HUMANS.
• infinitebit 1mo ago
  I agree with the idea that the taste, for lack of a better word, was the only thing that ever mattered. What I disagree with is the idea that slop that is “good enough” is indistinguishable from something that is crafted is “indistinguishable by the market”. I think it is indistinguishable in the short term, but very distinguishable on a long enough time span. The same way that hacked together slop has always been “good enough” to close a ticket and even get someone a promotion, but later costs the company thousands of engineering hours to rewrite once it becomes completely unreliable, slow and impossible to modify. We’re just speed running that now. It’s the same battle engineers with “taste” have been fighting with sales teams and product managers and lazy teammates before LLMs, just in fast forward.
• VaporJournalAPP 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• prokopton 1mo ago
  Whenever I see "is doing a lot of work here", I assume it's AI-generated.
• bitgeist 1mo ago
  My taste agrees with the point made but thinks this could've been a shorter article
• phendrenad2 1mo ago
  This post makes two mistakes. The first is an XKCD 605 (Extrapolating). The author makes bold predictions for the future as though they're inevitable, but gives zero evidence, because there is none, we're still at T=0. IBM is still in business. Wake me up when it's been taken out by someone vibe-designing a mainframe in kicad. Or even, let's see a dropbox clone get off the ground. Should be easy, right? (It's an HN tradition, after all.) The second mistake is mistaking a large multiplier for infinity. The cost of code has not "collapsed to almost nothing" as the author claims. Talk to your CTO/CFO if you want the real story. They're probably freaking out over AI spend. But the point is, yes, AI has made things cheaper, but they didn't become monotonically zero. AI had also raised the bar. You can't ship "good enough" anymore, it has to be great. And great still takes time. Time in QA, time obsessing over every workflow, time talking with customers and planning features. Taste hasn't even entered the picture, and the analysis is already wrong.
  • mickael-kerjean 1mo ago
    > dropbox clone get off the ground Thats exactly what Im working on: - web client: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash - desktop sync: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive In line with the infamous top comment during their launch, it does of course support FTP as a storage, and the other way around exposing your Dropbox as a FTP server, while supporting theme so you have a similar look and feel as well: https://www.filestash.app/img/screenshots/theme_dropbox.png https://www.filestash.app/img/screenshots/theme_dropbox.png + tons of stuff Dropbox never did
    • phendrenad2 1mo ago
      Hey looks good. If you productize it and get subscribers that'll be awesome.
• soundworlds 1mo ago
  We have the Power of gods. Now we need the Wisdom of gods.
  • cindyllm 1mo ago
    [dead]
• soundworlds 1mo ago
  Also just a shout out to the author - you're getting a lot of flak here, but your article hit me at the right time in the right way. I trust you're telling the truth about writing it yourself, and thank you.
• agentultra 1mo ago
  > I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to. The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of something. I still believe there is no royal road. Taste isn’t the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after. There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing. Too many people have tried to declare victory over software engineering prematurely and it shows.
• HeartStrings 1mo ago
  Humans will become the great filters.
• anupamk 1mo ago
  I found this post a bit too verbose and incoherent. It does read like AI slop to me, but the bigger issue is that its core argument itself seems flawed. The author seems to be advocating for choosing to "carry the burden" of one's taste (or aesthetics, judgement, standards, etc) while bemoaning that the market may not sufficiently reward for doing so. IMHO, the core flaw is in mixing these two things 1) the market rewarding what it chooses to reward; and 2) individuals choosing to pursue some external/internal rewards. I broadly agree with the premise that Gen AI has lowered the cost of software development and, as a result, the quality of the idea and its execution have become more salient differentiators than just the ability to bring an idea to reality. I also agree that pursuing one's own sense of taste/judgment or "objective function" is often intrinsically rewarding and worth it. But ultimately, an individual has to decide how much they want to (or need to) play for the external market rewards vs their own intrinsic rewards/motivations. But I don't think it's coherent to argue that the market "ought to" reward one for their oh-so-special but mysterious, amorphous, and unmeasurable way of doing things, or that pursuing one's own taste/judgement is somehow automatically an exercise in greatness.
  • strken 1mo ago
    I think there's a coherent argument lurking in there, but the author hasn't refined it enough. Here's my attempt. The industrial revolution seemed like the end of the artisan as an important man in his community, the death of good taste, and an apocalypse for professions like furniture makers. And yet, do you remember the Aeron chair, darling of the dotcom era startup? The Eames chair, that wood veneer conversation piece which every real estate agent chooses when staging an apartment? In an era of mass production, taste moves up the market, but it never quite goes away. Where does that leave our taste, dear reader? I am not sure. What I do know is that, just as the Aeron chair could not exist in a world without mass production, so too will there be tasteful software which cannot exist in a world without LLMs. I hope you're as excited as I am to build it. I have no idea whether this was the actual intent, but it's where the disparate little facts seem like they might lead.
    • anupamk 1mo ago
      > In an era of mass production, taste moves up the market, but it never quite goes away. I agree with the points in your version, and the part above is the “meat and potatoes” for me. I too am unsure about how much did the author intend to say something similar. The main area where I disagree with the original post is this apparent fusing of subjective/personal taste driven value and market rewards driven value. To summarize/clarify my view using the Aeron and Eames chair examples from your version 1. I agree that someone had to pursue their taste/vision for those products even when they could’ve “gotten away” with producing something mass produced and mediocre. And that pursuing their taste/vision likely became more feasible once the technology allowed them to focus on the “taste” while taking care of the boilerplate. 2. But, I will also add that the market actually saw value in Aeron and Eames chairs and rewarded their creators. It would’ve been incongruent for those creators to assert that their chairs were superior merely because they chose to pursue their taste/vision.
• sgt 1mo ago
  AI slop that's also simply wrong. Flagged.
• foundart 1mo ago
  It's an interesting article. To me it reads like someone who is not confident in their writing, but is very interested in getting their idea across, iterated with an LLM to produce it. It set off all my LLM writing triggers and I noped out after about 3 sentences, because I'm designing/coding with AI all day and I'm 100% sick of its writing. I don't really care if it was written by an LLM or a person who writes in LLM style. HOWEVER, the surprising fix for me was to ask a number of LLMs to summarize it. I omitted the "is this AI slop?" parts when I pasted it in. Like I said, I don't care about who wrote it, but I hated the writing style. The AI summaries were quite readable. They converged at a high level on the summary, but with a good bit of variance in nuance. I had a good follow up discussion with one of the LLMs, so I'm glad I tried it.
  • Petersipoi 1mo ago
    You hate LLM writing, so you took human written words and ran them through an LLM to read it? Hate to break it to you, but you don't hate LLM writing.
• KurSix 1mo ago
  Generating the first version is almost free now. Understanding why that version is subtly wrong, debugging it in production, maintaining it six months later and deciding whether the abstraction was a mistake are all still expensive...
  • matheusmoreira 1mo ago
    Yeah. The Fable oneshot is a myth, the software will still require constant refinement and maintenance. I've been daily driving my "vibecoded" projects and they're never really finished, there's always something to do.
• psychoslave 1mo ago
  Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name; he has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition. Haydn to Leopold, 1785 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haydn_and_Mozart#The_%22Haydn%22_quartets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haydn_and_Mozart#The_%22Haydn%...
• nullpoint420 1mo ago
  Wow does it feel good to read human prose again. It just feels so - refreshing. Like cold water in a desert
• nunez 1mo ago
  > The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was _the curriculum._ Prescient. I really have no idea how future software engineers will know how to write software in a world wherein software is written for them wholesale.
• yen223 1mo ago
  What's special about the fleshy brain that a digital chip cannot replicate its judgement?
• vdbijl 1mo ago
  It reminds me of I think Nietzsche, isn't it a quote of him? "In the end all that's left to us is taste"? I can't seem to find it so quickly, so maybe my memory is failing me. He definitely had a lot to say about taste.
• Witosso 1mo ago
  A poem by polish poet which say exactly this. TASTE For Professor Izydora Dambska It didn't require great character at all our refusal disagreement and resistance we had a shred of necessary courage but fundamentally it was a matter of taste Yes taste in which there are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience Who knows if we had been better and more attractively tempted sent rose-skinned women thin as a wafer or fantastic creatures from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch but what kind of hell was there at this time a wet pit the murderers' alley the barrack called a palace of justice a home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket sent Aurora's grandchildren out into the field boys with potato faces very ugly girls with red hands Verily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking (Marcus Tullius kept turning in his grave) chains of tautologies a couple of concepts like flails the dialectics of slaughterers no distinctions in reasoning syntax deprived of the beauty of the subjunctive So aesthetics can be helpful in life one should not neglect the study of beauty Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine the shape of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes official colours the despicable ritual of funerals Our eyes and ears refused obedience the princes of our senses proudly chose exile It did not require great character at all we had a shred of necessary courage but fundamentally it was a matter of taste Yes taste that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer even if for this the precious capital of the body the head must fall
• alexbelyanin 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• brador 1mo ago
  Don’t need taste when you’ve got the market homie. Great artists ship.
• yenepho 1mo ago
  Is the post-mortem written to sound like AI slop, or is it just that? Offending either way :P
• neuroticnews25 1mo ago
  Unconscious intuition you can't explain in words, thus can't reason about, as the main guiding principle in the ever more cognitively demanding world, yeah, good luck.
• joyheron42 1mo ago
  > 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. A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same essays I grew up reading I'm extremely irritated that the post is being accused of being AI slop. I have a visceral reaction to AI generated writing, and this post rang 100% human to me. Makes me actually quite angry that one can no longer use short, pithy sentences without being accused of using AI. If AI causes everyone to reject actual decent writing because someone can't distinguish between it and that from a human, we have other problems on our hand. The content of the post resonated with me 100% as well.
  • kuschku 1mo ago
    Same, the post has an entirely different speech rhythm than AI. In Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" he describes how, when cutting a movie, the reason cuts work at all is because human experience has cuts: we blink. More specifically, we blink when a thought is complete, to finish one thought and begin another. When a movie is well-edited, the audience will adapt to the rhythm of the movie, and you know you've placed a cut at the right moment when the audience will blink at the exact moment of the cut. The same "rhythm of thought" applies to written essays as well, and once you get a feeling for it, you'll notice how AI generated text follows no such rhythm, no such structure. AI generated text has the rhythm of TV salespeople combined with tiktok brainrot, overwhelming you while at the same time saying nothing at all.
  • alekoako2 1mo ago
    [flagged]
• Vasserot 1mo ago
  « Software works the same way. » No, I don't think so. Modern software has been around for about 50 years, the Internet & OOP for about 35 years. People have been cooking steaks since antiquity! If your opinion or understanding of how a program works or how it should work is your main asset for keeping your job, then I think you're the one who's going to get cooked. You’d have to be rather disillusioned to wake up in the post-COVID era, with technology that triples its algorithmic efficiency every year, and conclude that a dehumanizing industry will still need our expertise in the future. The key words here are “dehumanizing industry”. You can always bake your bread the old-fashioned way or cook your steak in « your own small restaurant », no one will stop you. But small restaurants, at least where I live, aren’t doing very well.
• abrbhat 1mo ago
  Taste seems something that should be more related to a craft but when doing engineering we don't talk about taste, we talk about theory, systems, practices, skill, intuition, experimentation, teaching and learning. So the debate on whether taste matters or not might come down to whether creating software can be called craft or engineering. In my opinion, maybe programming was more of a craft before LLMs but it looks like it is being squished between the engineering aspects of producing and maintaining software going ahead.
• jeffreygoesto 1mo ago
  [dead]
• abrbhat 1mo ago
  On a side note, since the author has included a detailed explanation that the text is not AI generated and this is her default writing style, I just find it very difficult to read this style of extra punchy writing. I don't know if it is just me or anyone else as well.
  • pascahousut 1mo ago
    I assume it's common and understandable to dislike LLM generated content and therefore anything that resembles it regardless of origin. For those who happen to write in a similar way it's a pity. I've noticed some people on the internet dismiss content just by its length too now. I assume this is because they're not used to the idea of a human producing long form content (as opposed to the short form rewarded by popular feeds). I wrote a post (other forum, other handle) where I included some markdown tables and detailed explanations in an attempt to be thorough and help others answer my question and got accused of having LLM generated it despite writing it myself. Maybe the usage of markdown tables or the length of the post was the issue. Anyway, it's not nice being dismissed as AI slop when no AI was involved. I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a forum.
    • ben_w 1mo ago
      > I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a forum. Perfectly reliable, no. But: 1. these models aren't even trying to hide their nature, if anything the opposite 2. a great many users of those models are (lazy or time constrained, doesn't matter which) or lacking in style of their own, and in each of these cases the result is they don't prompt the models to hide their default style; worse, the outputs keeps getting RLHF-ed so despite how much of an "ugh" factor it has to the reader, most people making these things, to the extent that they do review the content at all rather than blindly uploading, actually like the style 3. Models don't share state between users. This means the model won't act "bored" from having already written the same thing before, so when 5000 people all prompt for "blog post about X", then it will create 5000 blog posts with almost identical in writing style. In turn, this means that the style of the most-used model (I assume for English-language blog posts this is still ChatGPT) has become cliché faster and harder than almost anything else.
• account42 1mo ago
  I don't agree with the premise that creating is no longer the hard thing. It's only been automated when your taste is bad.
• nazgu1 1mo ago
  I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that looks even more AI-generated than the article. "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills are part of the author as-a-whole "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more? And... I wonder if this is like some agent wrote article, and, in the loop, added port-mortem, after visiting hacker-news comments and manipulate that this is human written. Or maybe author is just trolling us with AI-like prose...
  • Madmallard 1mo ago
    Engagement farming has found its way to Hacker News.
  • bonoboTP 1mo ago
    Had the same taste response, checked and Pangram also says AI. They have very low false positive rate.
  • scandox 1mo ago
    > I'm sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed you to feel this way. What fresh hell is this? If this is human then I wish it was AI
    • hypfer 1mo ago
      > and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however, I take your criticism to heart—although not personally—and strive to improve. I just do not understand why people - even when actively denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash. I don't care if it is the "right" thing to use there. The character has been associated with slop. Why do you keep using it without even just acknowledging that you did. Just use any other character - like I am doing right now. It must be AI indeed. Humans cannot be this dense. ___ Oh god I just saw the annotations on the side > A fair pushback I got: Dude. Why. Oh god. Why do you talk like claude. I want to believe you. I really do, but hell. Even claude could likely tell you that you sound like claude. Oh my god.
• QwenGlazer9000 1mo ago
  I'm worried about taste because to me it seems like something like taste would be the best thing for a ML model.
  • parasubvert 1mo ago
    That's interesting. I would (and I think most?) would say the opposite. Good taste is hard to define because it is very contextual. There's popular taste but also there's artisanal/specialized knowledge taste. One potentially leads to mass adoption, the other leads to higher value for a few people.
• dwedge 1mo ago
  > Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it. Just reading the title and I was already thinking about that book. It's a great book though it gets progressively more difficult
• kcexn 1mo ago
  I think whether "taste" was ever important comes down to whether software is a commodity to be bought and sold, or something more strategic. The company that needs a webapp because everyone else has one is never going to value "taste". To adapt to this AI world, we need to either ship more lower-quality software, or start seeking out higher value problems. I don't see any other way around it.
• the_wolo 1mo ago
  I really don't get why people here are so obsessed with "taste". I also find the premise of the article to be completely wrong. Taste, not only in software, is only the only thing that's left for humans, if you ignore the complex social environments in which our technological systems are embedded. AI puts the emphasis in the socio-technological system on the social. If you were never social to begin with, or if you deliberately ignore the social embeddedness of our systems b/c you are terminally valley pilled, you might come under the impression though that indeed, taste is the only thing that's left.
• Hoffesnthal 1mo ago
  How is this at the top of HN...
• cccchara 1mo ago
  Is taste really the one thing LLMs can't take away or do we talk about taste because judging has become the cheapest move available? I think focusing too much on taste is how we lose focus on the two questions that actually matter: what do I actually care about, and why do I make things at all.
  • sdellis 1mo ago
    You cannot separate "taste" from the question of "why do I make things at all?" because they are inextricably bound. The reason for your making something is where taste is expressed.
    • cccchara 1mo ago
      Agreed, and well put.
• burnto 1mo ago
  > Everyone can make anything. Almost no one can tell you what is worth making. That was always the harder skill. It is now the only one left. But people can and do tell you what is worth making. Taste is largely set by class and power. The “skill” is having the right context (wealth, education, network) and then pattern matching on it.
• Ac1285asFa 1mo ago
  "Taste" and "personalization" are this month's AI talking points.
• luckystarr 1mo ago
  Taste is something you use to build the guardrails of AI over time and many paper cuts endured. Once you have a big enough set of these (call them rules) recorded, they become your development substrate. You narrow the paths the agents can take to arrive at a coherent system. If you don't do that, superficially it may look similar, but it's not and users will be able to tell.
• gregwebs 1mo ago
  Taste ends up providing tangible value. If you have taste in writing code, you spend less time on bugs and can implment features more quickly. This is still true with LLMs if you learn how to direct them instead of having them direct you. Someone else without taste can re-implement what you have done with AI. But it will take them more effort, more time, and more money. But that's always been the value in writing code. Any MBA can end up producing software to accomplish something by hiring other people. But their company might not get off the ground because of the expense of not having technical competency (or engineers with taste) at their core.
• stiiv 1mo ago
  LLM-based code generation requires disciplined operation to lead to the best outcomes. Shops who only ever had taste as a proxy for discipline were missing this before, and they're missing it now. The fact that it's missing is why so many organizations are tolerating ever-growing mountains of slop. (Not new, by the way; just dramatically accelerated.) Discipline can be linked to system design standards and your review process, and it can be translated to measurable outcomes at scale and over time, regardless of how agents are involved: unplanned work, time to recovery, employee retention, etc. When outcomes like these become your priority, you see that you can't rely on taste alone.
• cribbles 1mo ago
  For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as enduring source of human comparative advantage to hit the HN front page. Previously: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241 You Had No Taste Before AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551
  • tfrancisl 1mo ago
    This article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?
    • no_multitudes 1mo ago
      "And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it." I'm 100% confident that a human did not write this sentence unless they were deliberately trying to sound like an LLM. Just look at it! You don't need Pangram. There's a classifier model between your ears that knows how humans write.
      • tfrancisl 1mo ago
        I'd retrain that model if I were you.
        • no_multitudes 1mo ago
          I'm generally quite open to the possibility that I'm wrong. I said 100% for this one because it is tooth-grindingly obvious. Could you give me some examples of long-form writing like this from before 2024? Generally to retrain my model I need data.
• softwaredoug 1mo ago
  If I ran a dev team, I’d spend a day a week on deliberately hand coding. Even if the clankers write most of the code, IMO we need deliberate practice to develop taste. There’s a side of taste that’s Rick Rubin, how the customer experiences something. There’s also what a classically trained cellist hears in a more tactile, layered sense in how another cellist plays a piece.
• arionhardison 1mo ago
  I won't try to posit whether this post was AI-generated or not and I do not think it matters. That focus is a defense mechanism for handling an uncomfortable idea. The idea is this: the commodification of intelligence requires the codification of domain expertise to function reliably, and proper governance to scale. Taste, in my opinion, is a fill-in for absent function and lack of utility. Systems function; they don't require taste. Taste is why PG put Sam Altman where he did — not a system of merit, not evidence. Taste is why DJT can do no wrong in the eyes of his base. It is unprovable and has no true measure, and that is exactly why it gets leaned on so heavily: it lets you claim superiority no matter what slop your system produces. You say the box moved taste up a level. Out of the making and into decision layer. That relocation is a smell. Your unfalsifiable thing conveniently gets moved to the one place it still can't be checked, at precisely the moment the making became checkable. Just like: Iran/Strait of Hormus, AI curing diseases and all of the other bold promises made by people who claim to be "taste makers" but in the end its all the same. Bullshit! Because thats what taste is a euphemism for in this context. Convincing others that you are correct in some way with no actual proof to back it up. The vector here should not be "taste"; it's tolerances: written down, measured, enforced. The judgment gets encoded into a spec, and the spec is what survives the person who had it. That is codification; not "taste".
• pngwen 1mo ago
  This brilliantly articulates what is required for best practices in the AI era. I am putting this article on my required reading list for Software Engineering. On behalf of my students, thank you for writing this!
• parasubvert 1mo ago
  Ironically, this essay is an example of at least somewhat "questionable taste". It has provoked dialogue and thus is valuable, but I think it makes a number of cognitive errors in its argument. "Taste" is just knowledge. Advanced knowledge. Knowledge that is not easily put into words. This is another restatement that knowledge, in a human head, is the determining factor of production, over land, labor and capital. This a post-capitalist argument that's been made for over 30 years (Peter Drucker in his 1993 book is my favorite), and it's been at least somewhat true even back to the 70s, just increasingly so as AI takes off. The author's sidebar of AI or even cloud computing "taking ownership of the means of production away from workers" is entirely misunderstanding how the modern economy operates and shows how badly we need a new Marx (and Keynes, Schumpeter, or Drucker) since his analysis doesn't seem to provide the same analytical value in late capitalism. Renting vs. owning the means of production is now entirely a function of knowledge of the entrepreneurs (and their team). Capital is ubiquitous now and is desperate for return - it remains powerful but is not all-powerful. We've had years of near-low interest rates and even after COVID inflation, they're still historically low. It is far more accessible to entrepreneurs than it has ever been in history, between grants, loans, subsidies, private equity, angels, crowdfunding, donations, etc. It's practically a cliche that billions in capital can be wasted on an initiative because the people involved had no idea what they were doing. I don't think AI changes that. We don't need to rent our tokens, we can run open models on our local rigs (which still requires capital). We don't need to rent our servers, we can buy, rack and stack them on our own. Which we choose is fentirely dependent on the knowledge we have. If we don't know how to run an AI rig, we must rent it. If we don't know how to run a server, we must rent it. etc. There are several walls driven by taste - Design - Testing - Production - Security - Scalability In particular, the author seems confused on what "production" is. Production is still the wall. There was a joke on X the other day: "I vibe coded my dream app! Try it out here: http://localhost:8080/coolapp" Software running in production is not tokens. I'm sure properly prompted AI can deploy and run simple software in production but this requires a lot of knowledge to prompt to constrain it to run in a secure, scalable, adaptable way as complexity, scale, and capability grows.
• xnx 1mo ago
  "De gustibus non est disputandum" ("In matters of taste, there can be no disputes") One thing I'm excited for is the expanded ability to modify and create my own interfaces and software so I don't have to be subjected to the bad taste of others. An example of this is something like Chrome reading mode that removes all the stupid decoration from what I'm trying to read.
  • rubenflamshep 1mo ago
    My workflow has become a sort of "living process". When I encounter friction in some part of it, I focus my attention on it, it adapts, grows from from an annoyance to something that I delight in when using. Some small examples: Google Chrome doesn't have default shortcuts for accessing bookmarks so I made an extension for myself that does this. I have a SketchyBar setup that I'm constantly updating. Recently added my CC/Codex plan usage to it so I'm no longer constantly running /status in the different CLIs. Etc, etc.
• hashmap 1mo ago
  If taste that's all that's left you've kinda really got nothing. Taste is an anti-moat, it's sort of a measure of how well you, as a literal receptor, agree with a pile of people out there on something. Like sure its something you can sort of develop but it costs you nothing to use, and if you're not creating something off-manifold you're just smearing stuff around that's already on it. Horrendous kind of take on "taste" that's taken hold of everyone. Kinda like if a music artist stopped making music to make spotify playlists. Sure they could maybe make _good_ playlists, but if they are sitting there crowing "taste is all thats left!" it's.. what is that? It just sounds like either a deluded giving up or just a very direct admission of giving up.
• adelks 1mo ago
  Very nice article. I agree with it, call it taste, call it judgment, call it quality, I want things done the way I see as satisfactory, and it requires me to make LLMs do things differently several times. Like exploring a tree with a heuristic they don't have and need to rely on us humans to give.
• hnx0rqy49u 1mo ago
  Okay that's a clever way to put it
• jplusequalt 1mo ago
  In an ideal world, something as nebulous, subjective, and unquantifiable as "taste" would never be the sole purpose of a technical practitioner. That so many developers believe this, is surely a sign of the fields impending death.
• deep_concern 1mo ago
  "When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. So create." - _why the lucky stiff
• ranprieur 1mo ago
  People in this thread are using the phrase "AI slop" as if everything made by AI is automatically slop. If you believe this, fair enough, but then you must support the abolition of AI. If you believe that AI is capable of making good things, then it doesn't matter whether this article, or anything, was AI generated. Whatever it is -- software, prose, images -- if you have taste, you don't have to figure out if it was made by AI or not. All you have to do is apply taste and determine how good it is.
  • falsepositive44 1mo ago
    I disagree. Using TechJudge from your blog, I'd put AI into the category of technologies that cause more harm than benefit for humanity. You once said we're like children in a forest, running around and putting every berry we find in our mouths. I believe generative AI (in the form of being generally available chatbots, writing and coding tools, image and music generators, etc) is a berry that's poisonous. Certainly so if we eat much of it. Making them generally available feels analogous to making the technology of nuclear fission or the invention of gunpowder generally available and shove it into every aspect of our lives. There are clearly some specific use cases where these technologies can be beneficial (in case of AI cancer pattern recognition from CT images sounds like one to me). But we need to be careful what we're using them for. So yes, in this sense their use (as a generally available technology) should be abolished or at least heavily restricted. It would also limit the externalities it's mindless use generates in environmental cost.
• qwery 1mo ago
  > This post reads off as AI slop. You said it, I see it. I completely disagree. I think this post has emdashes in the first paragraphs and that most of the people saying that it was generated didn't go any further than that. Where is the repetition? The sense of deja vu? Where is the artificial sweetener, the overuse of adjectives? Where is the lack of meaning? Suppose there was a group of highly motivated individuals that saw this article and felt called out by it -- prompt engineers, if you will. Because saying that "taste is all that's left" and that you can't develop taste without doing the work? That's saying that there's something still out of their reach. Something that can't be copied and reproduced ad nauseum. This article gets at the heart of the issue and calls out -- though not explicitly -- these practitioners. It does this in a calm and reasoned way, in a way that they cannot defend themselves from. I'm not making the claim that the article is an attack on anyone -- my claim is that a class of people will see it that way and react to that like Gamers seeing a 7/10 review for the game they're hyped for.
• hnal943 1mo ago
  > Taste Is All That's Left > I do not care about your taste. Is the point of this essay that there's nothing left?
• jongala 1mo ago
  Very nice post, I think it captures and expresses things that many people in the software and design worlds have thought about a lot in the last couple of years. I don't fully agree with it — for one thing, I think you can develop taste in a field without actively participating, but you have to engage with it beyond passive consumption. Basically: I think it's possible to be a good movie critic without making movies yourself. Given the collapse of the friction/effort side of things, I think that is really worth unpacking. I have to say I find the debates about the post's style and em dashes pretty disheartening. There have always been plenty of good jokes to be made about HN's culture, but wow. For a community that has been snarky about fools counting lines of code for 40 years to be out here counting em dashes is pretty damning.
  • bendmorris 1mo ago
    It is absolutely not the em dashes that make it read like slop and the author even acknowledges it.
• sbloz 1mo ago
  I agree with the conclusion of this, I think, but the consequences are more interresting. One of the biggest problems with this flood of apps and products is curation. For the things that "deserve to exist" how does anyone find them among the sea of slop? I don't think there's a good solution, at least one that exists today. Look at Steam, Netflix, Youtube, Amazon or really anything else. How do you find what's good? For me, most of the time, I just return to what I know. But that doesn't seem ... healthy? I disagree that consuming content in a field is not enough to build taste. I'd argue it's actually better than creating, simply due to scale. 1:1 sure, creating something will give you more "taste" than consuming something. But it's not 1:1. Creating takes so long. And creating mixes design and implementation. When you're implementing, most of the time, you aren't building taste. As far as creating quality things goes, and "the wall", doing it well becomes a practical problem. Writing code for example forces you to think deeply about what your building, what it does, and how it works. You can do that without writing code, you're just no longer forced to. It's not an intrinsic problem. It's just a nice side effect of coding that you lose, and need to figure out how to compensate for.
• pmkary 1mo ago
  I liked the article.
• lowbloodsugar 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• bogota 1mo ago
  [dead]
• dexterlagan 1mo ago
  "I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration." Claude, is that you? I haven't seen a human write like this, ever, and I've read a lot of books. The 'want to be careful here', the 'doing a lot of work'... common. If it had "I'd like to gently push back here" next to it, I wouldn't have been surprised.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• liampulles 1mo ago
  I think the main difference between me and Claude's work is that it doesn't find a needlessly complex solution offensive, and is happy to contribute that complex solution and to then move on and build further on it. After all, it works. The problem comes later when the code no longer reveals the domain and the processes of the business, and where changes start affecting other expected business behaviors (at least that is what I think would happen, I find the code too distasteful to let it get that far). Yes, that's partly a sense of qualified taste I've built through experience, but I think it also comes from trying to actually understand user needs better. E.g. Our finance department says they wants a daily report of invoices, but what do they ACTUALLY NEED? Maybe the problem to solve is to allow more flexibility with billing dates, or increase billing strike attempts, etc. That stuff sometimes doesn't come out until you really ask because of all sorts of organizational and social beliefs, fears, etc. Practicing that and recognizing the signs means you can do that rethinking earlier on in the process, before dev starts.
• Corvyn 1mo ago
  It has always been about taste. In all my years in industry, that has never not been true. AI isn’t suddenly making taste important. It’s shortening the time between someone’s product judgment and its contact with reality. Previously, bad taste could hide in a fog of war: technical delays, market shifts, implementation tradeoffs, changing budgets, and shifting priorities. By the time the product reached users, causality to how much 'taste mattered' was murky. Now, we can see more clearly (and much earlier) whether the judgment behind a product creates value. AI (and it's usage in this context) makes it harder to hide bad taste. Through that lens, I think this is a good thing.