Taste Is All That's Left

“For taste governs every free — as opposed to rote — human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea..."

In either case, taste being all that's left doesn't really help at all since whatever FAANG or top startups do is by definition good taste. Same for fashion, art and so on with the top being suitably defined. Slim fit was all the rage until all the uncool people got in and that's what ended the trend and not any friction or utility.

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 the most accepted/expected optimal choices and anything that falls outside the trend will be “not good” in the same way skeuomorphism in design is no longer good.

So we’re lucky we’re in a taste era - it’s a lot of fun. You (yes you!) can still change it, shape it, establish the status quo of tomorrow

How convenient it is that we’re all so awesome according to the one metric that can’t be measured

Every AI-frustrated (but LLM-written, sigh) blog post about the loss of taste and craft and hard work in development sounds like we've given up the interaction with the machine. Like human work is sitting back in your chair and shitting on stuff.

That's obviously not true! That's not how any of this works!

It's hard and weird to develop with the LLMs because they just do stuff. Lots of it is good, some of it is OK, some of it's horrible. Unpacking what it's done is hard and weird because software isn't just lovely UX, it's also data structures that scale and performance and privacy and enterprise controls and SOC 2 and onboarding and accessibility.

If you want to build real software, all that stuff has to get done. Today you're working on the feature, tomorrow you're making it scale. It's long-term and iterative and complex and hard to pack into a prompt or a markdown spec.

The work is the work, done at and with the computer, and it's way more than just "taste."

Doesn't that mean guaranteed failure in the market if you use taste as your guiding star? Therefore, there's really no way to enter the market anymore.

I don't know how you then ship software or monetise it...? The market will just clone it.

So... Don't share stuff publicly? Only share with closed groups? Where does this leave small-time software development...?

This article is unfortunately full of vague slop like this. It seems the author doesn’t trust their own taste.

I also completely disagree with the premise though - so many seem desperate to discuss the implications of a singularity which shows no sign of arriving.

LLMs have ingested the entire internet and are able to generate plausible and mostly accurate text on demand.

What is missing from thee output of LLMs: intelligence, agency, motivation, morality, discrimination and yes, taste.

And honestly: I've been tired of an age of engineers that are beat down, that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious. It often is still very sensible and practical and what you should shoot for! But there are also people wandering around now trying much harder! And I am excited for those frontiers! I think it will challenge and shake the foundations that we've accepted as true, as There Is No Alternative, in exciting bold and fun ways.

I am however pretty unconvinced by the article. There's a lot that doesn't quite work for me, that isn't building the case I'd like, whose takes are off from my read.

> The output is good enough—that is the problem. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output.

Agreed about the rationing of output. I do think that the article though continues to show a magical thinking. That we have these things now and they autonomously do the thing. That the LLM's have solved it all.

The article itself goes on at length about how nebulous and abstract taste is:

> Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument

But this contrasts so distinctly to me against "the output is good enough". Is it? That depends. That depends on your taste. The proximate first results come quick. But the technics underneath? Those themselves, in my view, rely enormously on engineering taste to support and advance. I think we see a very similar sort of magical delivery thinking, very clearly on display here:

> When the factories came, they could suddenly make everything—cheaply, uniformly, by the thousand.

As if there was some magical "good enough" transition where suddenly the aliens came and gave us this box that just does the thing. As if we discovered the right formulas and math and now: we had production. Again I think there's just an enormous amount of work and taste that is still actively required inside the factory box, that building the industrial processes is incredibly intense & difficult, even though we have reliable industry-line production and now robots doing the labor.

There's still so many gems, so much lovely material for thought. I love the provocations here, and I think there's a lot of great calibration.

> The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum.

Makes me think of yesterdays @apenwarr banger,

> Every slow prototype started out as a fast prototype, I think that’s how it goes https://bsky.app/profile/apenwarr.ca/post/3msemlo4rds2h

> But the ratio was never the danger. It held steady for centuries. What held the flood back was that producing the crap cost something. Bad novels still took a year to write. Bad software still took a month to build.

I want to rename the title to "Blogs writing in LLMish are all that's left".

Seriously, take this one: "But the ratio was never the danger.".

Who the FUCK speaks like that?