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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#131

Post by ricardobeat »

vor_ wrote: post #107
DrBrock wrote: post #77

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.

They've updated the article to state that no LLM was used.

The update itself has strong AI tells:

> 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.

> That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who wrote it.

> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one

Either the author is doing this on purpose, or this is some kind of art project. I don’t buy the “just a coincidence” story at all.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#132

Post by dyauspitr »

mdwelsh wrote: post #35

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 t…

The LLM has its own intuition and judgement which at this point is quite good. I’m not just throwing that around, I use LLMs 12-14 hours a day and for a long time reviewed atleast 75% of the code.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#133

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

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.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#134

Post by notashelf »

GrayHerring wrote: post #40

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.

I think you agree with what is in the essence of the post, but has been worded poorly. I do agree that most things are mediocre at best. Hell, I'd argue that most of my comments on everyday observations are negative. Ranging from "this sucks :/" to "holy fuck". They are, however, "good enough" for some and despite how clever I must to notice how much something sucks, that does nothing to the fact that it will receive adoption. Turns out I'm not clever. Huh.

In hindsight, I have worded this rather poorly and let some phrases do a lot of heavily lifting for me in the post. Ultimately, I agree with you. Knowing, for this instance, is not half the battle.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#135

Post by nemomarx »

boron1006 wrote: post #128

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 everythi…

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?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#136

Post by notashelf »

hellojomp wrote: post #8

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 deve…

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.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#137

Post by bijowo1676 »

NathanKP wrote: post #98
bijowo1676 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/mcd... so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei. The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the bes…

how about tools like Lovable ?

is Lovable used internally to create and improve Lovable product itself ?

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#138

Post by notashelf »

mdwelsh wrote: post #35

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 t…

For what it is worth, I appreciate you sharing your experience. Looks like you have more programming experience than I have in life, so your comment matters to me. It also gets rather close to something I wanted to evaluate in the post: "whether any real intuition or judgment went into [its] design". I think that's a big question to dwell on these days.

Ironically, though, I had written a post that had people debating whether I put any intuition or judgement into. Would've been real ironic to instead add a post-scriptum that said "Yep, none of it matters. I just slopped something in 5 minutes and it easily went to the frontpage. Look how easy it is!" but unfortunately that is not why I write, not what I intended to achieve, and not something I am equipped to do. I care about my work, which is why I care about your comment as well.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#139

Post by akoboldfrying »

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

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#140

Post by KerrAvon »

asdfman123 wrote: post #122
abixb wrote: post #119

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,"…

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.

This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked out.
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