I use AI for code and we review that code and write tests ourselves first which the AI cannot touch. For writing we hardly ever do, unless we know the requester of something is incompetent and will never read it anyway; then it is a waste of time to do anything, but they expect something substantial and nice looking to tick a few boxes. It is great for that; a large bank with 40 layers of management, all equally incompetent, asked for a 'all encompassing technical document vault'; one of them sent an 'expectation document' which contained so much garbage as to show they did not even know what they were asking, but 1000s of pages was the expectation. So sure, claude will write that in an hour, notebooklm will add 100 slidedecks for juiceness. At first sight it looks amazing; its probably mostly accurate as well, but who knows; they will never ever read it; no one will. We got the 20m+ (with many opportunities to grow much larger) project. Before that was only in reach of the huge consultants (where everyone in those management levels worked before probably) who we used to lose against. Slop has its purpose.
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
31–40 of 230 posts
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#32https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/2024140332963705342?s=46 evergreen.
usually when you call something "evergreen" it's not 2 months old
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#33Ah, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Designer vs 41 shades of blue. This is nothing new. There's space for everybody.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#34Disagree with the overall argument. Human effort is still a moat. I've been spending the past couple of months creating a codebase that is almost entirely AI-generated. 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.
There's some truth in there that judgement is as important as ever, though I'm not sure I'd call it taste. I'm finding that you have to have an extremely clear product vision, along with an extremely clear language used to describe that product, for AI to be used effectively. Know your terms, know how you want your features to be split up into modules, know what you want the interfaces of those modules to be.
Without the above, you run into the same issue devs would run into before AI - the codebase becomes an incoherent mess, and even AI can't untangle it because the confusion gets embedded into its own context.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#35[flagged]
It’s not that straightforward. Art directors and designers get paid to visually communicate things the business wants to communicate— anything from brand vibes, to directing people to click on a “buy me” button, to the state of an interface. Most designers in tech companies aren’t even the ones that design things like branding — that’s done by specialists in extremely well-compensated studios, and corporate designers are stuck following their guidelines. Taste is nearly irrelevant to an interface designer, for example.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#36It buried the more important point, one tech hasn't learned yet.
Taste may be kind of important because it helps toward the truly important thing, which is skin-in-the-game.
But also, with the right skin-in-the-game, you don't even need "taste." You just need real life consequences, which we don't do enough in tech.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#37> A practical loop for training taste
Taste is cheap. Taste (or a rudimentary version of it at least) is something you start with at the beginning of your career. Taste is the thing that tells you "this is fucking cool", or "I don't know why but this just looks right". LLM's are not going to replicate that because it's not a human and taste isn't something you can make. Now - MAKING something that "looks right" is hard, and because LLM's are churning out the middle - the middle is moving somewhere else. Just like rich people during the summer.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#38And 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 r…
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