It is profoundly ironic that this article is AI generated.
Looks like the comments on this article are too.
Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
61–70 of 230 posts
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#62> Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left
> YC startups are doomed
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#63Disagree 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…
> 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.
We have a term for this and it is called "Comprehension Debt" [0] [1].
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08942
[1] https://medium.com/@addyosmani/comprehension-debt-the-hidden...
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#64If 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?
Regardless of how good the tools get, third-party tooling can never be a product differentiator unless you somehow manage to have exclusive access. Otherwise, everyone else out there can and will use the same tools you are. It's more a hedonic treadmill than a moat.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#65Disagree 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 feel like you're pretty strongly agreeing that taste is important: " I'm finding that you have to have an extremely clear product vision..."" Clear production vision that you're building the right thing in the right way -- this involves a lot of taste to get right. Good PMs have this. Good enginers have this. Visionary leaders have this.... The execution of using AI to generate the code and other artifacts, is a ma…
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 agree with all the examples of good taste that you brought up.
But even with impeccable taste, you still need to learn, try things, have ideas, change your mind etc.. putting all of that in the bucket of "taste" is stretching it..
However, having good taste when putting in the effort, gets your further than with effort alone. In fact, effort alone gets you nowhere, and taste alone gets you nowhere. Once you marry the two you get somewhere.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#66Ever since Rick Rubin has been on his book tour, he has become the patron saint of Product Manger Tech Twitter.
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#67Reminds me of PG's classic essay, "Taste for Makers" (2002): https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#68> 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?" That's the classic 2nd-system effect - "let's rewrite it from scratch, now that we know what we want". And you throw away all the hard-learned lessons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Not really the case; you're misunderstanding the term second system effect.
> The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says is a "big pile". For example, consider the IBM 709 architecture, later embodied in the 7090. This is an upgrade, a second system for the very successful and clean 704. The operation set is so rich and profuse that only about half of it was regularly used. (p.55)
>
> The second-system effect has another manifestation somewhat different from pure functional embellishment. That is a tendency to refine techniques whose very existence has been made obsolete by changes in basic system assumptions. (p.56)
Suggest that you re-read what Brooks meant by "second system effect".
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#69Good judgment and effort has always been the "real moat" - in arts, music, science, food, product...
There's always been ways to "flatten the middle" - by outsourcing, by using pre-packaged goods, with industrialization...
So yeah we've always loved handcrafted, exquisite things; there's never been a "moat" in middle
It doesn't mean you can't make a good living without a moat though
Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm looking at it from a team perspective. With the right docs, I can lift every developer of every skill level up to a minimum "floor" and influence every line of code that gets committed to move it closer to "perfect". I'm not writing every prompt so there is still some variation, but this approach has given us very high quality PRs with very minimal overhead by getting the initial generation passes as close to "pe…
Oh I agree with you, I'm just saying a lot of developers don't want to use it like that. AI has liberated them from the drudgery of reading and writing code and they won't accept that they should still be doing a bit of both, if not a lot of reading.
It does amaze me when colleagues refuse to read what I (personally, deliberately) wrote (they ask AI to summarize), but then tell AI to write their response and it's absolutely bloated and full of misconceptions around my original document.
If they aren't willing to read what I put effort into, why should I be expected to read the ill-conceived and verbose response? I really don't want to get into a match of my AI arguing with your AI, but that's what they've told me I should be doing...