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Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

rajnandan.com

51–60 of 230 posts

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#51
Designers and product managers were showing Steve Jobs all the fancy things the new app for writing DVDs could do.

Steve Jobs stopped them, drew a square on the whiteboard and said “anything the user drags into this square gets written to the DVD” - that is taste!

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#52

Disagree 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, t…

I think you're missing the point. Effort is a moat now because centaurs (human+AI) still beat AIs, but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed).

The goal is to replicate human labor, and they're closing that gap. Once they do (maybe decades, but probably will happen), then only that "special something" will remain. Taste, vision... We shall all become Rick Rubins.

Until 2045, when they ship RubinGPT

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#53
This cope is insane. Even simple projects generated by Claude are riddled with bugs. And there’s no way in hell it could generate a larger scoped project without a lot of manual human intervention. But yea, TODO apps and trivial calculators are effectively “solved”. Same with leetcode. I guess that’s probably the limit of many people’s imagination these days.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#55
post #43

> That is why so much AI-generated work feels familiar: This was already a complaint people had before Ai. Like when logos and landing pages all used to look the same. Or coffee shops all looking the same.

Or cars, or apartment buildings, or houses, or....

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#57

Disagree 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, t…

You make a really salient point about having a clear vision and using clear language. Patrick Zgambo says that working with AI is spellcasting; you just need to know the magic words. The more I work with AI tools, the more I agree.

Now, figuring out those words? That's the hard part.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#58

Disagree 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, t…

> ... for AI to be used effectively.

I'm continually fascinated by the huge differences in individual ability to produce successful results with AI. I always assumed that one of the benefits of AI was "anyone can do this". Then I realized a lot of people I interact with don't really understand the problem they're trying to solve all that well, and have some irrational belief that they can get AI to brute force their way to a solution.

For me I don't even use the more powerful models (just Sonnet 4.6) and have yet to have a project not come out fairly successful in a short period of time. This includes graded live coding examples for interviews, so there is at least some objective measurement that these are functional.

Strangely I find traditional software engineers, especially experienced ones, are generally the worst at achieving success. They often treat working with an agent too much like software engineering and end up building bad software rather than useful solutions to the core problem.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#59
I agree with the author and I think this is turning everyone into an investor. How I view (financial) investing as a career is that it is less manual and more taste oriented. You put your stake in the things you feel will work out and taste here just means the judgement required to make good calls. A person with good taste would have a better idea of capital allocation.

What AI is doing is making all of us investors instead of doers. "Doing" is no longer something praiseworthy - what will become praiseworthy is how your taste has turned out in hindsight.

I'm seeing this at work. More or less everyone can do tasks well. But what's harder now is the more subtle task of taking bets and seeing it work over a few months or years.

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