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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#221

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

dmarcos wrote: post #148
madrox wrote: post #142

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 s…

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.

Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#222

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

hellojomp wrote: post #38
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…

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?

i have never had a "mcdonald's mcdouble", whatever that is. i cook my own burgers because i am a human being and i want to eat real food, not nauseating slop that should only be fed to livestock

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#223

Post by raincole »

ryeights wrote: post #149
ricardobeat wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all the comments taking this article seriously. I think AI has broken HN. The readership is so head-in-the-sand about AI that they wouldn't recognize 2000 words of Claudeslop if it genuinely slapped them in the face

Most commenters only read the title. That's it.

The alternative explanation (the top commenters actually read it and somehow didn't recognize it's obviously written with AI) is just too bleak and I choose to not believe that.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#224

Post by anupamk »

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.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#225

Post by lodovic »

drowntoge wrote: post #155
NathanKP wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes. So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it…

I think babysitting the AI would be a better term than vibe coding. At work they call it "AI assisted engineering" and "synthetic coworkers"

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#226

Post by didibus »

notashelf wrote: post #146
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…

I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around? Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good enough" for something if a significant amount of resources keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this is gar…

I'd agree with the OP you are responding, what he means is that this isn't just about taste. It's that the code, while it works, and the text, while it has the ideas in it, is still not to the level of a human author. It's not that it isn't tasteful, in the sense of having the flair of specific author X, but it is verbose, goes around the point to get to it, etc.

Taste seems to imply an art, but I don't think we're at the point of cleverness, of LLM innovating a new beautiful programming paradigm or pattern out of immaculate taste for code. We're just talking more basic, even bad devs have more terseness, more clear intent in their prose and code, etc.

It's "good enough" for many use-cases, but it could be better, even before expecting the most beautifully clear code from the best devs out there, it has not reached the level of the average one in readability and clarity of expression (both code and prose). That annoys the author, he has to intervene manually to trim all the fat, and therefore not "good enough".

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#228

Post by didibus »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #204
pornel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autore…

> They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering productivity, where "quantity over quality"…

There's a quote I forgot that says: "There is a Quality to Quantity".

I think it was from a Chinese person, as they took manufacturing of cheap things, low quality stuff, but managed to scale it to mass quantities.

I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured, well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-cases that benefit from accessible cheap software. Those use-cases were not viable prior, because cost/time was prohibitive.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#229

Post by Marha01 »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #204
pornel wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're pretty useful for search (as RAG and autore…

> They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do more than no code. If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering productivity, where "quantity over quality"…

> Because I guarantee I can produce dozens of PRs daily, each having tens of thousands of LoC deltas (pick any language you desire), none of which having research and/or understanding underpinning them, and all easily quantified as being "brute force."

I can guarantee that you cannot produce such PRs in the same quantity/quality than a modern LLM. The speed at which today's LLMs output code is superhuman.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#230

Post by kaizenb »

madrox wrote: post #142

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 s…

"What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive advantages anymore?"

This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be copied very easily and in scale these days.

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