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Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

rajnandan.com

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Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#11

Post by CharlieDigital » 

    > One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it.
Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse engineering docs from an existing codebase.

This is a mistake.

Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated.

This exercise is hard for some folks to grasp because they've never thought much about what well-constructed code or architectures looks like; they have no "taste" and thus no ability to precisely dictate the framework for "perfect" (yes, there is some subjectivity that reflects taste).

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#12

Post by pa7ch »

gmaster1440 wrote: post #5

If you're properly bitter-lesson-pilled then why wouldn't better models continue to develop and improve taste and discernment when it comes to design, development, and just better thinking overall?

I think the author addresses this in saying that since AI output is statistically plausible by design its unlikely to improve in this area. Why do you think AI will get better in this way?

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#14

Post by echelon »

allears wrote: post #7

And if anybody knows about good taste, it's techies, right?

Some of the worst taste and worst opinions.

Lots of techies hate things that are popular with the rest of humanity. You see lots of nagging, complaining, and disconnected from reality takes. Hate for Instagram, "Dropbox will never work", "pop culture sucks", etc.

I'll make a mean joke: a lot of y'all better learn a trade. Plumbing, perhaps. I kid, of course, but I also wonder if it might turn out to be the eventual reality.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#15

Post by rvz »

Well, nope. There are three real moats left in software:

Distribution, Data (Proprietary) and Iteration Speed.

Very successful companies have all three: Stripe, Meta, Google, Amazon.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#17

Post by sodapopcan »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #11

> One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it. Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse eng…

> Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated.

I think this goes against what a lot of developers want AI to be (not me, to be clear).

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