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Taste Is All That's Left

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Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#81

Post by jauntywundrkind »

amberjack wrote: post #44

[flagged]

> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either

Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not understand how genuine human people could think it good to "comment" like this.

There's just such a ridiculous pile on of people with such enormous overwhelming negativity underneath this ocmment. This off-gassing is almost never engaged with the material. Now there's an excuse to write off any material we don't like instantly, to accuse it of fakeness. But I still do not see a realness enscribed upon people who so actively work to tear down & prevent thought & consideration.

To engage with the post: I do think the definition of fashion is interesting, and a real power dynamic to be aware of. But do think there's a lot of things that take off in the world because they are good and interesting and nice, especially in technology and products, that the world wants nice things, and will happily support you for doing that. And especially in tech, the technical decisions we start from and build underfoot steer us towards success in subtle compounding ways, that matter, and that taste is crucial, where fashion is not a factor.

Again, at a meta level: my distress & frustration at the top is less from seeing this comment, and far more from seeing everything down thread trying to out-do one another with how cynical and anti-meaning anti-trying they can be. But I think this post definitely started on an all too familiar note, blood in the HN waters that all too often gets us so sharky.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#82

Post by dvt »

inigyou wrote: post #76
dvt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product? Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand. I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript fu…

> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language

This is true, but I was mostly referring to framework boilerplate (Spring, React, etc.) or plumbing boilerplate. If you've ever written code professionally, you know that most code that you write is just making your thing fit with someone else's thing.

If your consumer or your provider made bad engineering decisions, you have to absorb them. If your company mandates the use of a framework, you have to absorb that, and so on. So I think it's great that AI can write all the dumb shit I didn't come up with anyway.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#83

Post by sodapopcan »

inigyou wrote: post #76
dvt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they thought coding is all that there is to making a product? Frankly, this barely scratches the surface of the hubris of engineers. I personally think AI has been one of the best things to happen to software engineering. Writing boilerplate or my millionth auth implementation was never why I fell in love with the craft in the first place.

We have computers, computers can automate things. Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer). But then we add infinite automation features to reduce boilerplate and we get C++, and C++ programmers decry the excessive number of features and want to delete them all and go back to writing boilerplate by hand. I once wrote a pile of C++ templates that would let you wrap a C++ function as a JavaScript fu…

> Boilerplate is a sign of a bad language (not a bad engineer).

It's also a sign of refusal to learn an editor or IDE deeply. Most of the ones I know have mechanisms (or plugins) for generating the boilerplate.

Although back to the language, usually the biggest boilerplate killer are macros and so many developers seem to really have a problem with them.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#84

Post by icedrift »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #81
amberjack wrote: post #44

[flagged]

> So let me be plain about it: Claude was not here. No LLM wrote this—not a sentence of it, nor was it outlined, drafted, reviewed, checked, etc. by one, and there is no prompt behind it either Following form of the words I just read: these 100% animous filled HN threads about how everyone is bad and everything deserves mocker have to be some elaborate power game to undermine hope and human will, I genuinely do not u…

IMO giving "benefit of the doubt" to something beyond doubt is bad, straight up. If someone can't tell this article is AI then they need to go spend an hour a day reading known AI writing vs known human writing until they develop the skill; the voice of this author SCREAMS AI.

I'm a firm believer in not engaging with or promoting the content of misrepresented AI.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#85

Post by pnathan »

> Suppose you have taste. Suppose you paid the full price and you can feel the sag in the sentence and the wrongness in the function. > > Congratulations! You now ship at exactly the same speed as the person who cannot.

Yes, previously the person who didn't understand shipped faster. It was a long standing problem. The people who crapped, got the bonus, and ran were much faster than the patient engineer of quality.

By the way, what were the essays that formulated Claude Style? if the author was indeed formed by them, I'd like to read them - or at least enough of them to understand.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#86

Post by socketcluster »

In software development, good taste translates to readability, succinctness and maintainability of the code. It also translates to intuitiveness, reliability, security, performance, scalability and utility of the software.

All this doesn't necessarily translate to sales though. Because, to evaluate those things requires attention, trust, time and effort.

This is a significant barrier because a lot of software will appear to meet all of these superficially.

After 1 day of usage, a piece of software may appear to be intuitive, reliable, secure, performant and useful... But then after some time (sometimes a whole week or longer) you run into a critical scenario and discover that it cannot be solved with that software... Or performance drops off sharply after you created the 1000th record in the software... Or a hacker takes months to find that one endpoint which allows full remote code execution.

Even in an optimistic scenario, 1 week is a long time to evaluate a piece of software. I've encountered software which took 6 months and large teams of people to realize that it wasn't suitable. That's how long it took to hit the critical limits. It's a very long evaluation loop.

So you cannot judge new software efficiently by just looking at it. Even industry consensus is problematic if the software is very new and complex... Plenty of trends have fallen off a cliff in the past. You need to understand who is behind the software... And even that's not so easy; social proof can be misleading when it comes to deep technical ideas. The people who are good at social networking aren't necessarily good with tech.

I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem than people anticipate. And the irony of it is that the solutions already exist... What doesn't exist is the mechanism to identify those solutions. But even the mindset needs to be corrected first.

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#88

Post by bijowo1676 »

hellojomp wrote: post #38
mdwelsh wrote: post #35

This article resonated tremendously with me, speaking as someone who has been coding since the 1980s and had to develop my own taste the hard way, through lots and lots of mistakes. Whenever I see a software demo built by someone mostly using agents to do the work, I have to question whether it's any good on the inside - or whether any real intuition or judgment went into its design. On the flip side, maybe none of t…

I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?

it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers

so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#89

Post by bijowo1676 »

hellojomp wrote: post #38
mdwelsh wrote: post #35

This article resonated tremendously with me, speaking as someone who has been coding since the 1980s and had to develop my own taste the hard way, through lots and lots of mistakes. Whenever I see a software demo built by someone mostly using agents to do the work, I have to question whether it's any good on the inside - or whether any real intuition or judgment went into its design. On the flip side, maybe none of t…

I wonder, when you have a McDonald's McDouble, do you really care how it was made or do you just care that it's yummeroni and costs $2.99?

it is profitable to sell McDoubles, since they are popular and cheap, but McDonalds CEO doesnt eat its own burgers

https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1rhug58/mcd...

so it is profitable to sell vibecoding tools, but its unlikely to be consumed by "serious organizations"

Re: Taste Is All That's Left

#90

Post by zelphirkalt »

purplemoonx wrote: post #10

Taste was all that was left when product design peaked in like 2010-12 too and it was a great time. But the advent of design systems and software like Sketch and Figma pretty much automated the job away. You didn’t need the raw Photoshop skills anymore - any CMU grad could be a top tier designer now. I see the same thing basically happening here. Taste will matter for a while but eventually people are just choosing t…

I have yet to see a good design falling out of people building flying castles in Figma, disconnected from the realities and basics of web development's languages HTML and CSS.
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