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You can't unit test for taste

dev.karltryggvason.com

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Re: You can't unit test for taste

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t it introduced on Tahoe? (Perhaps my memory is failing me here.) Do you mean it still persists on Golden Gate? They seem to have addressed the majority of issues I heard about - unless you mean the issue is that rounded corners exist at all.

See: https://medium.com/@makalin/reclaiming-the-screen-a-develope...

AI written article with two fullscreen popups?

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#123
I’m confused about the choice for Parquet and DuckDB here. PostGIS is arguably a better match for what this project is doing, and would let you skip most of if not all uses of Shapely and Pyproj.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#124
post #4

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. Except that I can't fully externalize myself. Debugging a system takes more resources than running the system. If I could write down everything I…

The bigger problem I have as a worker is that, once I externalize it (by writing a skill or whatever), it becomes a work-for-hire whose copyright is owned by my employer. Technically this is true of a few other things I do for work, like my .emacs and .bashrc files, small scripts I keep in ~/bin on my workstation, etc., but no employer cares to assert this unless they're being assholes for some unrelated reason. Agen…

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

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#126
post #4

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. Except that I can't fully externalize myself. Debugging a system takes more resources than running the system. If I could write down everything I…

Emailed!

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote the HIG before Alan came in and trashed the place.

Indeed, I'm sure Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.

Steve Jobs was also responsible for brilliant bits of usability like puck mice, and the need to have two functioning hands in order to right-click.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#128
You can’t unit test for all the aspects that make up taste, it’s true.

But if you break off parts of that - eg. by looking at what is codified out there as “good” design, what’s considered best practice etc - you can create tools the agent can call on that let it get critiques of its own work.

What’s really cool about this is those tools can be code, written by agents and committed to your repo. Put together a script that for example makes sure your brand colors are enforced (eg. https://github.com/cadamsdotcom/CodeLeash/blob/main/scripts/...) and then put it in your pre-commit checks (https://github.com/cadamsdotcom/CodeLeash/blob/main/.pre-com...), and the agent will get feedback on its use of tasteless defaults and adjust accordingly (partly because you blocked commits that contain said tasteless defaults!)

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