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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

#201

Post by danielvaughn »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #177
danielvaughn wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think it is temporary. As AI becomes more powerful, we'll simply ask it to do more difficult things. There's a level of complexity where "do the thing" is insufficient. We'll never be at a place where AI can infer vast amounts of nuance from simple human requests, which means that humans will always need to be able to describe precisely what they want. This has always been the core skill for software deve…

Do you believe a junior developer now will never surpass you? Why couldn’t AI do the same?

It's not a matter of whether it surpasses me. In some respects it already has - I watch Claude Code spitting out long terminal commands that I've never even seen in my 15 year career.

The question is whether AI will ever become good enough to magically infer information where none is provided.

For instance, I've had this startup idea for an itemized physical storage company. We'll never reach a point where I can simply say "Hey AI, create all the software necessary for an itemized physical storage company". It's not because AI won't continue to improve, it's because there's literally not enough detail in that statement to understand what I mean. It's too vague. I'm sure the AI of tomorrow could do a pretty good job in guessing what I mean by it, but the chance of it capturing my vision is literally 0%.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#202

Post by skydhash »

edgyquant wrote: post #163
stronglikedan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've gotten way further than I would have otherwise at this pace, but it was still a lot of effort, and I still wasted time going down rabbit holes on features that didn't work out. By the time I'm done learning about the structure of the code that AI wrote, and reviewing it for correctness and completeness, it seems to be as much effort as if I had just written it myself. And I fear that will continue to be the re…

Well that is not how anyone is doing agentic coding though. That sounds like just a worse version of traditional coding. Most people are building test suites to verify correctness and not caring about the code

Test suites don't verify correctness. They just ensure that you haven't broke something so bad the specific instances that the tests assert have turned into a failure. You can have a factorial function and more likely the test cases will only be a few numbers. Which does not guarantee correctness as someone who know about the test cases can just put a switch and return the correct response for those specific cases.

The compromise is worth it in traditional coding, because someone will care about the implementation. The test cases are more like the canary in the coal mine. A failure warrants investigations but an all green is not a guarantee of success.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#203

Post by piptastic »

hellisothers wrote: post #117
arnorhs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I understood it, the original article is saying the _only_ remaining differentiator is taste and the comment you replied to is saying "wrong, there are also other things, such as effort". I don't necessarily interpret the comment you replied to as saying that "taste is not important", which seems like what you are replying to, just that it's not the only remaining thing. I agree that taste gets you far. And I…

Aren’t you just making their point stronger? Effort is what is being replaced here, with some taste and a pile of AI (formerly effort) you can go to the moon.

Effort is still (and probably will always be) the hardest thing to replace.

Any time someone says AI can do this, and do that, and blah blah. I say ok, take the AI and go do that.. the barrier to entry is so low you should be able to do whatever you want. And they say, oh, no, I don't want to do that (or can't, or whatever). But it should be able to be done.. And I just nod, and sip my drink, and ...

.. and I'd like to point out these are seasoned professionals that I've seen put in effort into other things in their careers that have the capacity to literally do whatever is they want to do, especially now.. and they choose not to do so, at least not without someone guaranteeing them a paycheck or telling them they have to do it to survive.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#204

Post by PaulShomo »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #198

I'm not sure this is only true of LLMs - most corporate sites are very similar. Professional designers learn very quickly not to be too quirky or unique. I think this is symptomatic of humans - our comfort zone is the "7 out of 10" morass of similarity and blandness. We are herd animals. LLMs are just reflecting this. And I don't think our tendency to herd will allow us to select the quirky outliers even if that's th…

There's perception of value in the quirky outliers, and there's liking a trendy cow, in the herd-mindset signaling kind of way. We definitely have both style of aficionados, each could be said to be appreciating a different kind of taste.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#205

Post by skyberrys »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #173
freediddy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, just an idea will be enough for your Neurolink to spawn an agent to create 1000 different versions of your idea along with things that mimic your tendencies. There will be no effort, only choice.

As both a software engineer and a creative, I absolutely do not want 1,000 versions of what I am trying to make generated for me. I don't care if it's free or even cheap. I want to make things. I know this is a concept deeply alien to a lot of HN's userbase but I did not get into programming or making art to have finished products; that's a necessary function that is lovely when it's reached, but ultimately, I derive…

Could I even remember 1000 versions of a thing and still distinctly know which one is which?

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#206

Post by eru »

lamasery wrote: post #98
eru wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the joke that the guy is drinking bad coffee?

The joke is that the person "saying" this is wearing their "I'm a rational, independent thinker!" tech uniform (expensive Nordic outdoors wear, so practical, so smart, so active, Vimes' boot theory, et c, not like those clowns in business wear, I'm interested in practicality not signaling, that's why I'm spending so much money signaling so hard about how rational I am). They are visibly displaying a complete lack of…

Thanks for explaining. We don't get much of this 'uniform' here in Singapore. It's too hot for tech people to wear long trousers and long sleeves.

I guess it makes sense of a joke. Though I don't think sense in fashion correlates much with sense in technology: the guy might just be wearing what everyone else is wearing, so that his wife doesn't bug him about it and he can concentrate on the hills he's actually prepared to die on?

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#207

Post by eru »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #143
ibero wrote: post #9

https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/2024140332963705342?s=46 evergreen.

This seems more telling on the artist who, I guess, believes that if you have taste in any field, it will manifest itself as wearing stylish clothes. I see their most recent blog post is analyzing luxury brands, so I think I'm on point here.

I don't mind when people want to spend a lot of money on clothing. But I mind when they judge other people for caring less.

(And as a pet peeve, I don't really understand why people can spend so much money on off-the-rack clothing and outfits? If you want to spend a lot of money, perhaps go to a tailor? But hey, it's their money, not mine.)

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#209

Post by krackers »

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 mean developing taste is what RLHF was supposed to give you. I don't think it's actually a technical problem so much as a social one. The average person _wants_ slop, they don't want to read new yorker articles, they'd much rather read romcoms. A model trained to produce tasteful writing would almost surely have less engagement from the public (considering that engagement and lmarena-maxing is what led to the characteristic punchy style in the first place)

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#210

Post by 9rx »

hellisothers wrote: post #117
arnorhs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I understood it, the original article is saying the _only_ remaining differentiator is taste and the comment you replied to is saying "wrong, there are also other things, such as effort". I don't necessarily interpret the comment you replied to as saying that "taste is not important", which seems like what you are replying to, just that it's not the only remaining thing. I agree that taste gets you far. And I…

Aren’t you just making their point stronger? Effort is what is being replaced here, with some taste and a pile of AI (formerly effort) you can go to the moon.

> Effort is what is being replaced here

Not really. The effort required to produce the same result has declined, but it has been on the decline for many decades already. That is nothing new. Of course, in the real world, nobody wants the same result over and over, so expectations will always expand to consume all of your available effort.

If there is some future where your effort has been replaced, it won't be AI that we're talking about.

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