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..."
These 100% AI generated posts about taste have to be some elaborate performance art piece, I genuinely do not understand how someone could think it a good idea "write" this.
In either case, taste being all that's left doesn't really help at all since whatever FAANG or top startups do is by definition good taste. Same for fashion, art and so on with the top being suitably defined. Slim fit was all the rage until all the uncool people got in and that's what ended the trend and not any friction or utility.
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?
I keep seeing people trying to define judgement and taste and then they don’t actually like cite Kant’s Critique of Judgement where this is basically the entire concern.
This 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.
It resonated with me too, and even as a once fairly prolific coder that now uses agents to do all the coding, I feel like this is all relevant and does matter. The agent does whatever you ask and provides thin judgements based on what it thinks is your motivation and context, even feeding it the context it will often make bad generic choices. I think this is the part hard to optimize because it's not a verifiable reward, it's the feel of the software. I think Herdr is a great example, I've tried several dozen terminal multiplexers / session aggregators and they are all vibed and different, but this one felt so much better to use because of its choices and actually increased the number of parallel sessions I was able to keep going. My own projects I find I have to stress every detail, that is what makes the software good now is really diving into it, the experience feels like just as much of a craft as coding was and 'taste' captures the concept for me.
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.
Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time.
But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now.
I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.
So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow
Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.
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.
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.
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."
> 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...?
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.
I keep coming back to this turn. It is not consolation but a correction.
This article is unfortunately full of vague slop like this. It seems the author doesn’t trust their own taste.
I also completely disagree with the premise though - so many seem desperate to discuss the implications of a singularity which shows no sign of arriving.
LLMs have ingested the entire internet and are able to generate plausible and mostly accurate text on demand.
What is missing from thee output of LLMs:
intelligence, agency, motivation, morality, discrimination and yes, taste.
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.
I agree with your criticism of "the good enough" and "done with taste" dichotomy.
I would like to comment on this, though:
> that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious.
I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve it: functions are simple, easy to reason about, properly named and composable.
It's the opposite of blunt, though, so it might be that you meant something else with the term "simple" :)
TFA's title is: "Taste Is All That's Left" but when I read the following:
> But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build.
I want to rename the title to "Blogs writing in LLMish are all that's left".
Seriously, take this one: "But the ratio was never the danger.".
More importantly, why are there always 30 people who insist that you can’t know it’s claudeslop? Or, “so what if it is,” or something like this? It boggles the mind.
That reminds me of story where the US Air Force attempted to design a cheaper cockpit and chair that would fit the "average pilot".. but in practice it fit nobody well. They went back to the drawing-board and put in all sorts of adjustable components instead.
This is likely because the individual measures being averaged like "femur length" were not independent from one-another, even where they had the benefit of being normally distributed.
The specific quote that we are talking about reads like something I wouldn't find unusual in the works of an individual. Maybe not from someone who stands out as someone who writes things that you'd actually want to read, but from an average Joe? It is likely. I, being no wordsmith myself, have written things just like that. It looks quite typical of how people write to me.
In fact, I find no meaningful difference between "But no _individual_ speaks like this." and "But the ratio was never the danger.", aside from them being about different topics. They are syntactically very similar.
The person you're replying to is saying that it wasn't written. If you are the author, I will believe you that it was. If you are not the author, I have no idea why you think you know more than anyone else does.
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.
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.
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..."
These 100% AI generated posts about taste have to be some elaborate performance art piece, I genuinely do not understand how someone could think it a good idea "write" this.
In either case, taste being all that's left doesn't really help at all since whatever FAANG or top startups do is by definition good taste. Same for fashion, art and so on with the top being suitably defined. Slim fit was all the rage until all the uncool people got in and that's what ended the trend and not any friction or utility.
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?
The Rick Rubin meme
I keep seeing people trying to define judgement and taste and then they don’t actually like cite Kant’s Critique of Judgement where this is basically the entire concern.
Speaks more to the myopia of developers than anything else.
Most people in Comp Sci don’t read Kant unless they have a concentration in Artificial Intelligence, so I’m not blaming them.
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.
It resonated with me too, and even as a once fairly prolific coder that now uses agents to do all the coding, I feel like this is all relevant and does matter. The agent does whatever you ask and provides thin judgements based on what it thinks is your motivation and context, even feeding it the context it will often make bad generic choices. I think this is the part hard to optimize because it's not a verifiable reward, it's the feel of the software. I think Herdr is a great example, I've tried several dozen terminal multiplexers / session aggregators and they are all vibed and different, but this one felt so much better to use because of its choices and actually increased the number of parallel sessions I was able to keep going. My own projects I find I have to stress every detail, that is what makes the software good now is really diving into it, the experience feels like just as much of a craft as coding was and 'taste' captures the concept for me.
I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?
People who care about their health aren't ignorant about that. I think that can apply to software too: if you care about safety or privacy you might think twice before using vibe-coded software.
Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time.
But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now.
I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.
So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow
Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do have to have... well, taste. Figma didn’t change that one bit.
Everybody thinks they have good taste don’t they.
How convenient it is that we’re all so awesome according to the one metric that can’t be measured
yeah the skill du jour keeps shifting. Everyone wants to say they have something the llm doesn't. The more subjective and ill-defined that "something" is the better.
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.
Mediocre is good enough, that's what it means.
This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.
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."
> 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...?
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
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.
I don't think any of these tech people talking about 'taste' have any. Least of not a person with an anime profile image in their about me.
Intentional anonymity is perfectly tasteful.
I keep coming back to this turn. It is not consolation but a correction.
This article is unfortunately full of vague slop like this. It seems the author doesn’t trust their own taste.
I also completely disagree with the premise though - so many seem desperate to discuss the implications of a singularity which shows no sign of arriving.
LLMs have ingested the entire internet and are able to generate plausible and mostly accurate text on demand.
What is missing from thee output of LLMs: intelligence, agency, motivation, morality, discrimination and yes, taste.
There's a lot here that I enjoy muddling on. And I think taste is very vital. Taste, ambition, seeing possibility: these resonate to me, long resonate, as what I've wanted to see.
And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and what you should shoot for! But there are also people wandering around now trying much harder! And I am excited for those frontiers! I think it will challenge and shake the foundations that we've accepted as true, as There Is No Alternative, in exciting bold and fun ways.
I am however pretty unconvinced by the article. There's a lot that doesn't quite work for me, that isn't building the case I'd like, whose takes are off from my read.
> The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output.
Agreed about the rationing of output. I do think that the article though continues to show a magical thinking. That we have these things now and they autonomously do the thing. That the LLM's have solved it all.
The article itself goes on at length about how nebulous and abstract taste is:
> Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument
But this contrasts so distinctly to me against "the output is good enough". Is it? That depends. That depends on your taste. The proximate first results come quick. But the technics underneath? Those themselves, in my view, rely enormously on engineering taste to support and advance. I think we see a very similar sort of magical delivery thinking, very clearly on display here:
> When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand.
As if there was some magical "good enough" transition where suddenly the aliens came and gave us this box that just does the thing. As if we discovered the right formulas and math and now: we had production. Again I think there's just an enormous amount of work and taste that is still actively required inside the factory box, that building the industrial processes is incredibly intense & difficult, even though we have reliable industry-line production and now robots doing the labor.
There's still so many gems, so much lovely material for thought. I love the provocations here, and I think there's a lot of great calibration.
> The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum.
Makes me think of yesterdays @apenwarr banger,
> Every slow prototype started out as a fast prototype, I think that’s how it goes https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h
I agree with your criticism of "the good enough" and "done with taste" dichotomy.
I would like to comment on this, though:
> that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious.
I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve it: functions are simple, easy to reason about, properly named and composable.
It's the opposite of blunt, though, so it might be that you meant something else with the term "simple" :)
would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account
AI slop
TFA's title is: "Taste Is All That's Left" but when I read the following:
> But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build.
I want to rename the title to "Blogs writing in LLMish are all that's left".
Seriously, take this one: "But the ratio was never the danger.".
Who the FUCK speaks like that?
Hemingway wrote the same way. Here's a famous example from the Old Man and the Sea:
Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
The reason is simple: Short sentences are punchy. They hit hard, carry emotional weight.
P.S. As evident, clearly I'm having some fun with this, but the point stands.
Short sentences were never the danger, or what the GP is referring to.
More importantly, why are there always 30 people who insist that you can’t know it’s claudeslop? Or, “so what if it is,” or something like this? It boggles the mind.
Yep, it is slop. I got 2-3 paragraphs in and closed the tab, as too many LLMisms raised their ugly heads.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
Walter Hartwell White, I suppose.
> Who the FUCK speaks like that?
If we assume that it is LLM generated, as suggested, apparently a lot of people, as the LLMs were trained to mimic how people speak (write).
You might find it to be unusual because you probably have never read anything written by most people. Only peculiar characters tend to get noticed.
But no _individual_ speaks like this. It is not common that a guy representative of the Average Of All People Plus Some RL writes a blog post.
That reminds me of story where the US Air Force attempted to design a cheaper cockpit and chair that would fit the "average pilot".. but in practice it fit nobody well. They went back to the drawing-board and put in all sorts of adjustable components instead.
This is likely because the individual measures being averaged like "femur length" were not independent from one-another, even where they had the benefit of being normally distributed.
The specific quote that we are talking about reads like something I wouldn't find unusual in the works of an individual. Maybe not from someone who stands out as someone who writes things that you'd actually want to read, but from an average Joe? It is likely. I, being no wordsmith myself, have written things just like that. It looks quite typical of how people write to me.
In fact, I find no meaningful difference between "But no _individual_ speaks like this." and "But the ratio was never the danger.", aside from them being about different topics. They are syntactically very similar.
> 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?
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
> It's a blog post. It was written.
The person you're replying to is saying that it wasn't written. If you are the author, I will believe you that it was. If you are not the author, I have no idea why you think you know more than anyone else does.
Yes, your pedantry shows how you're very clever. Please be very clever somewhere else.
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.
Thank you, I take great pride and effort in compressing as much emotional weight into as short a statement as possible.
I miss when people used to hide emotional fragility, and not publicly brag about being physically and emotionally devastated by an HN comment.
Please be nostalgic somewhere else.
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.