The Rick Rubin meme
Oof :)
The irony of OP championing for “taste” in the age of mass produced slop, only to then post something that was likely produced by repeatedly reprompting with “no, again”
Taste Is All That's Left
291–300 of 586 posts
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#292We'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…
That's not really what I think of when I think of taste in software development. I think of taste more in the sense of how to go about architecting something, what problems are worth solving, what technologies should be used, how to structure the code and documentation, how the APIs should function, what the scope of the thing should be, knowing what to do and what not to do, yada yada. That's all taste and LLMs suck at it (noting that taste is very subjective).
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#293We'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.
It was always easy to copy software (but yes, even easier now). The hard part is competing with the software that you're copying. Software does not exist in a vacuum. They usually have an already established user base, relationships with partner businesses, more domain knowledge due to having to actually think about the problems they are solving and so on.
You can start by copying but at some point you'll have to differentiate, and you might not be able to do so if you don't understand how your sloppy vibe-copied software works.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have another agent write the tests and verify the former agent ? This is pretty basic stuff. Makes me question if people are actually trying to use AI
Now you have two problems lol, in that you don't know if the tests are any good or actually test the thing in question. Sooner or later you run out of turtles to put on the stack.
That’s a solved problem, you just add another agent to check if the tests are any good, and one more to oversee the test-checker, and one more…
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#295We'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…
I think the point is without taste you wouldn't even know what things should be copied out of the countless competitors. How would you even know in the first place if a competitor did a particular thing tastefully without a good sense of taste yourself?
Also, there are a lot of areas where taste will absolutely reign supreme (and has been), especially anything related to media or entertainment (books, articles, videos, games, music, etc.)
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#296> 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. A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same essays I grew up reading
I'm extremely irritated that the post is being accused of being AI slop. I have a visceral reaction to AI generated writing, and this post rang 100% human to me.
Makes me actually quite angry that one can no longer use short, pithy sentences without being accused of using AI. If AI causes everyone to reject actual decent writing because someone can't distinguish between it and that from a human, we have other problems on our hand.
The content of the post resonated with me 100% as well.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#297I 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…
This is just a problem of articulating what you want. Most people can't write for shit, I'm sorry. Because they maybe took one writing class in college. It's a skill in it's own. LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with and the reasons are obvious. If it rambles or is too "purple", that's on the person prompting it, because they can't write for shit to begin with.
Then why is it that ALL content generated by LLMs, no matter who prompted it, is of such low quality?
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marketing and designers do not get more say in software. They get more say on the "surface", which we all know is 10% of the software.
Yes but that 10% is all that matter to the people that matter to the business. Like a car, most people care about how it looks and how they interact with it... the only people who care what is under the hood, for the most part, are other engineers.
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Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#299« Software works the same way. »
No, I don't think so.
Modern software has been around for about 50 years, the Internet & OOP for about 35 years.
People have been cooking steaks since antiquity!
If your opinion or understanding of how a program works or how it should work is your main asset for keeping your job, then I think you're the one who's going to get cooked. You’d have to be rather disillusioned to wake up in the post-COVID era, with technology that triples its algorithmic efficiency every year, and conclude that a dehumanizing industry will still need our expertise in the future.
The key words here are “dehumanizing industry”. You can always bake your bread the old-fashioned way or cook your steak in « your own small restaurant », no one will stop you. But small restaurants, at least where I live, aren’t doing very well.
Re: Taste Is All That's Left
#300Hard 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.
You are using countless products that are built or have become maintained by AI without realizing it apparently.
I do notice and realize, and I've gotten to the point where I had to fork and patch most of them to fix the shitty AI generated code.
It's so bad, and so everywhere, that I'm genuinely considering switching to a pre-AI stable distro and waiting 10 years for the AI hyped to be over before updating any piece of software ever again.