[HN Gopher] Taste Is All That's Left
___________________________________________________________________
Taste Is All That's Left
Author : tsak
Score : 552 points
Date : 2026-08-06 17:01 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notashelf.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (notashelf.dev)
| cobertos wrote:
| > The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did
| not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does
| not show up in the diff.
|
| 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...?
| nemomarx wrote:
| Someone can replicate any high fashion piece of clothing you
| make by hand. Maybe they could even make it better. Buyers
| still care about the origin, just in a pretty small market for
| it.
|
| Maybe software moves to this after it's commoditized? Users
| might prefer an artisanal one vs ordering it off the shelf or
| using an agent themselves.
| mister_mort wrote:
| Well, this has been true (to a lesser extent) for decades. See
| "Worse Is Better" and all the subsequent essays and writing
| following on from that
| jopsen wrote:
| > Doesn't that mean guaranteed failure in the market if you use
| taste as your guiding star?
|
| If taste is maintainability, etc.. the no quite the opposite.
|
| The startup that has no taste and vibecodes mindlessly might
| end up with a codebase they can't maintain or refactor. A
| product that can't advance.
|
| But honestly, I don't feel like the toil is gone. Landing code
| in big projects remain hard.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| There's a lot here that I enjoy muddling on. And I think taste is
| very vital. Taste, ambition, seeing possibility: these resonate
| to me, long resonate, as what I've wanted to see.
|
| 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
| prerok wrote:
| I agree with your criticism of "the good enough" and "done with
| taste" dichotomy.
|
| I would like to comment on this, though:
|
| > that only want simple, that finding the most blunt approach
| is the only way. It has felt tasteless. Anti-ambitious.
|
| I am always aiming for simple. If it's simple, it's
| maintainable and can be easy to reason about. Doing that is
| hard work, though. I used to spend three iterations to achieve
| it: functions are simple, easy to reason about, properly named
| and composable.
|
| It's the opposite of blunt, though, so it might be that you
| meant something else with the term "simple" :)
| drekipus wrote:
| Perhaps it's... "simple to implement."
|
| Usually it can be that the complex artifact is the simplest
| to implement. It's harder to make the simple thing
|
| Classic, Rich Hicky, "simple made, easy" talk reference.
| hellojomp wrote:
| On the topic of taste, I think of this quote in Susan Sontag's
| "Notes On 'Camp'" often:
|
| "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..."
| notashelf wrote:
| This is an incredibly insightful comment, thank you. I had not
| read "Notes On 'Camp'" at the time of writing (and nor do much
| reading for the post in particular) but it seems very
| intriguing from what I can find on the internet.
| dbtc wrote:
| "Consistent sensibility" is a tasty little phrase.
|
| I think taste is developed from a combination of sensual
| attunement (clarity of perception and focus) and experience
| (exposure to relevant, high quality 'stuff'), but the catalyst
| is joy, or at least some kind of pleasure.
| psadri wrote:
| This is an awesome thread. I agree - the catalyst is joy, in
| a broad sense of the word. One is lucky to find joy in
| something that can take you deep.
| relativeadv wrote:
| i'd completely forgotten about notes on camp, had to read that
| in modernist criticism class. good stuff.
|
| i see parallels to zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance as
| well, who's whole thesis if i can recall is something like,
| "quality cannot be put into words." Its a pre-rational thing
| that, try as you might, can't be pinned down.
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| An important feature of taste is also that it is highly
| variable between people, and because there is no system or
| proof of good taste, we cannot really say that one person's
| taste is objectively better than another's. This is what causes
| one person to build a large software system in a classical OOP
| language while another builds almost the same system in a typed
| functional language, each following their own internal logic of
| what is good taste. In the end we learn something from it, and
| maybe someone who worked on both projects refine their taste
| and starts preferring something that lies in between the two
| paradigms and comes up with a new interesting programming
| language.
|
| One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more people
| use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the "average
| taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new interesting
| ideas about how to build things.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| > One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more
| people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the
| "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new
| interesting ideas about how to build things.
|
| It is a possibility. But I also think we're underestimating
| the human need to create cool, unique things. Like yes most
| of the projects in this situation will have "average taste"
| but most of the projects out there today already do. Very few
| people have true taste and I don't think we're just going to
| see them disappear or be satisfied with LLMs feeding them
| "average taste." They will either likely stop using LLMs if
| that is the case or find ways around it to make it do things
| the way they want to, hence preserving their taste.
|
| But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs will
| just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers will
| be hackin
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| I also don't think it will kill creativity in the space,
| although my phrasing might have suggested that, just that
| it might diminish it and make implementation styles more
| conformative.
|
| On the other hand, we might trade that for creativity in
| other more high level designs where things like coding
| style is an unimportant detail for the experiment. For
| example, I have started playing around with
| microcontrollers because I can have the LLM generate the
| software while I focus on learning how to solder and think
| about how to modularize my hobby automation system. That's
| creativity and taste at a higher level which I didn't have
| access to before because I didn't want to invest my
| precious free time in learning the software ecosystem.
| ipsod wrote:
| I feel two ways about it. I've written some algorithms
| and architectures for motion control that were good,
| after many years of chewing on the problem through
| iterations. I don't think I'll replicate that effort or
| those results, now that I use LLM's so much.
|
| On the other hand, I did that in pursuit of a goal, and
| LLM's take me further, faster, toward that goal.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But I think it is a bit of an overblown fear that LLMs
| will just kill creativity and innovation in coding. Hackers
| will be hackin_
|
| Hacking and a taste for hacking is a muscle you develop.
| LLMs will make most people not train it at all. Same way a
| huge number of people are obese and out of shape. For LLMs
| to be bad news in this regard, it doesn't matter if some
| people will still find a way to do something creative. As
| long as far more people (than without LLMs) don't, that's
| already bad news.
| don_esteban wrote:
| It is exactly like that.
|
| Yes, there are exercise nuts who are exercising like
| crazy, but the average population is getting weak and
| obese.
|
| The same with mental muscles.
|
| How many people can do mental calculations in their head
| nowadays?
|
| What about remembering several phones numbers?
|
| What about simply navigating with map but without GPS?
| (Or, heaven forbid, just by common sense and
| observation?)
|
| Properly thinking about hard problems is exhausting.
| Majority will be glad to offload the hard thinking to an
| AI 'assistant'. The same way we offloaded computing to
| calculators, and memory and navigation to phones.
|
| What remains is the easily manipulated lizard brain...
| inigyou wrote:
| Heck, how many people in this room remember _their own_
| phone number?
| KurSix wrote:
| The problem may not be that LLM taste is bad, but that it is
| incredibly easy to converge on
| dcow wrote:
| Have you ever used enterprise software?
| base698 wrote:
| Seriously. Whatever slop is going to be an improvement for
| 99% of enterprise products. 99.9% of internal tools at
| large companies.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| something something SAP something
| coldtea wrote:
| > _because there is no system or proof of good taste, we
| cannot really say that one person 's taste is objectively
| better than another's_
|
| We can't say it in times of a general culture of confusion,
| like now. In times when there was an established cultural and
| artistic hierarchy, they could.
| inigyou wrote:
| Was it objectively correct or was it just the king's taste?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| literally: sumptuary laws restricting what you can wear,
| eat, or own
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
|
| not kings per se, maybe sultan, or the royal court, roman
| senate, etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| > One thing I fear is going to happen when more and more
| people use LLM's for coding is that they will default to the
| "average taste" of the LLM, and we will stop getting new
| interesting ideas about how to build things.
|
| I don't think it will have any impact at all on creativity in
| coding.
|
| Creativity is rewarded in humans, just not by their
| employment where both training examples and monetary rewards
| can be found, rather the creativity is rewarded by challenges
| such as code golf, demoscene, and so on.
|
| Go to a job interview and I have to know the shibboleths of
| Clean Code, SOLID, an arbitrary one of five frameworks, three
| different ways to handle asynchronous code, and four design
| patterns, and the magic word "agile". Invent something new at
| the workplace? If you're in a small team, or high enough in
| the hierarchy, fine. Big team? People will reject it with
| reference to those same shibboleths.
| inigyou wrote:
| Casey Muratori says they're both bad language choices as long
| as the software is slow.
| jmbwell wrote:
| I wrestle with this also. A colleague pointed out that LLMs
| reduce language choice to an implementation detail... don't
| have to know assembly to write python, and now you don't have
| to know python to write a functional app. So why stick with
| python when rust might be better? Leave that to the LLM and
| let your engineering effort go toward designing the app
| instead of operating a programming language.
|
| In which case yeah, projects are likely to converge on
| whatever pattern LLMs broadly fall into. But maybe that part
| doesn't really matter. Not every project needs the engineer
| to care about that. If I'm not writing hardware level code, I
| don't care what instructions my python compiles to, either.
|
| Meanwhile nothing prevents someone from caring about these
| details if wanted or needed. Someone who knows and cares
| might absolutely do a better job than an LLM. Those people
| won't necessarily go away.
|
| But there -will- be a whole new category of software
| contributors who have ideas they don't know how to express in
| a software language. Those ideas might well be very tasteful.
| So it could be argued that software development as a field
| will gain access to a whole new range of tastes.
|
| I don't know the answers but it all seems plausible
| xiaoyu2006 wrote:
| To be a bit more precise, SE is the practice to organize
| large codebase in a meaningful and human friendly way. AI
| will attract more hackers doing fun projects without
| careing about implementation details under a much higher
| level of abstraction, but they will not introduce more
| variation in SE.
| KurSix wrote:
| Yeah once taste can be fully reduced to rules, it stops being
| taste and becomes something you can optimize for
| ghtbircshotbe wrote:
| I'm a little confused. She follows describing people with
| good/bad taste immediately with the statement that there is no
| system for taste. If it is all relative, then how is she
| determining that someone has good or bad taste? Is there
| anything between moral relativism and mathematical proof? Just
| your own ineffable belief that you are right?
| customguy wrote:
| well yes, you can't help but have your own taste, and like
| the taste of others according to your taste of taste(s?).
|
| And I think taste is subjective by definition, it doesn't
| compete with "objective taste" because that makes no sense.
| jmbwell wrote:
| Someone with questions about this excerpt of Sontag on taste
| would do well to read the rest of the work, which does a
| fuller job of drawing distinctions between sensibilities like
| taste, and systematic ideas like good/bad, morality,
| relativism, mathematics, proofs, and wrong/right.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems to be circular.
|
| Wouldn't anyone need some reading "taste" in the first
| place to decide to read more.
|
| And if they already have it, why would they need to read
| it?
|
| If it's all relative there can be no globally valid, or
| fixed, reference points by definition.
| ghtbircshotbe wrote:
| It looks like it's only 15 pages and I do like camp, so I
| think I may have a go at it
| jhbadger wrote:
| Even if something is relative, you can compare it to what
| other people believe. If most people who know person X think
| X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less
| agree, or at least that they aspire to having similar taste
| like how more people admire those who like classical music
| than listen to it themselves) then it is reasonable to say
| that person X has "good taste".
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > If it is all relative, then how is she determining that
| someone has good or bad taste? Is there anything between
| moral relativism and mathematical proof?
|
| Social proof. Everyone has taste and everyone's taste in a
| given space is influenced and informed by the taste of
| others. It's mostly a consensus model. Newer members of a
| given community arise into said community and learn from it
| what "good" means, which can sound authoritarian but is
| really just... voluntary. If you like, for example, mens
| formal wear you will follow publications and noted figures in
| the mens formal wear space, you will learn what "good" means
| to them, and will emulate it out of a desire to fit in with
| them. As you get more knowledgeable in that space, you will
| develop your taste, enhanced by them, and ideally eventually
| contribute your own ideas to that mix. Some will be accepted,
| some will be rejected, again by group consensus.
|
| It's a lot like language. If you want to speak a language you
| have to learn it first. If you go to France and simply blurt
| out French words at people, even with perfect annunciation,
| you will be incomprehensible to them. You learn structure,
| sentences, how to communicate ideas, how to inflect tone. How
| to tell the difference between telling someone to fuck off
| when they cut you off in traffic versus telling them to fuck
| off when they make a horrific pun. And, as people speak that
| language and use it daily, it will reliably change. The
| meanings of so many words in every language today are wildly
| different than they were even a hundred years ago.
| purplemoonx wrote:
| 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 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
| notpushkin wrote:
| Design is not moving pixels around in Photoshop or Figma. CMU
| grad could be a designer, but to be a great designer you do
| have to have... well, taste. Figma didn't change that one bit.
| purplemoonx wrote:
| I never quite fell for the scam of "designer who can't
| photoshop".
|
| You can't do product design without visual design - and many
| designers don't. They're picking from UI libraries like
| Tailwind or MUI, which is really something any developer
| could do, and many do. That's why the job mostly died.
|
| Even the most abstract of painters, fine artists, and so-on
| should have good fundamentals. They've gone through the
| discipline and developed taste, they don't choose it from a
| library.
|
| The CMU grad (using this as a stand-in now for any so-called
| educated hack, sorry CMU) is skipping all that and asserting
| personal authority without proving or living anything. And
| that shows IMO.
|
| My probably unpopular opinion is that using AI can be very
| creative and you can get into flow states, and the quality of
| outputs vary by skill of the user.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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.
| trjordan wrote:
| If we define taste as the intuitive act of saying "no, again,"
| then I fully disagree with this whole article.
|
| 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."
| dcre wrote:
| This post sucks, and it was also written by Claude.
| dcre wrote:
| This post is awful! Annoyingly written and zero insight. Most
| posts about this taste concept are bad (and there have been so
| many), but this is below average.
| dcre wrote:
| Heh whoops. I thought my other comment didn't post so I wrote
| this one instead.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| You've read many of them? Then you'd be the best to review even
| more of them! I'm ready for a raw and truthful review of my
| very own edition of the "taste" blog post, posted mere ~6
| months ago, on the same topic: https://emsh.cat/en/good-taste/
| dcre wrote:
| Ha! I have a heterodox view on the taste thing, which is that
| it's mostly cope: the models apply something like taste in
| nearly everything they do, and these taste posts will
| disappear as that becomes more obvious. However, besides the
| substantive disagreement, I think your post is fine since it
| appears to be your actual point of view, written down by
| hand. It's not particularly novel or insightful (most of
| these takes are basically "there are still some things the
| models can't do" -- no shit!) but it's measured and
| reasonable. Fine.
| grey-area wrote:
| [flagged]
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I keep seeing people trying to define judgement and taste and
| then they don't actually like cite Kant's Critique of Judgement
| where this is basically the entire concern.
| FLeXMurphy wrote:
| Speaks more to the myopia of developers than anything else.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Most people in Comp Sci don't read Kant unless they have a
| concentration in Artificial Intelligence, so I'm not blaming
| them.
| FLeXMurphy wrote:
| I'm not only referring to that, I'm also referring to a
| reductionist view when I read "Taste Is All That's Left" -
| which is a statement that has been mindlessly parroted
| around as of late.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Yeah even if Dev Schumer is some absurd hype artist he
| was correct to note that it is judgement _and_ taste, not
| taste alone, that is most key now. Although he attributed
| it to the models own subjectivity.
| asdewqqwer wrote:
| Why is it a reductionism view? A true reductionist will
| no doubt claim taste won't left as well, at least not as
| a non-private langauge.
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Hume also has an essay about this. People don't read philosophy
| anymore. They think blog posts are just as good, or at least
| more "relevant", somehow.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Look I mean, many famous artists don't understand their work
| at all. You don't have to have read philosophy to create
| something meaningful or make an insightful comment. But if
| you are going to start using terms like Judgement or Taste,
| you really ought to know where they come from.
| soundworlds wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I have personally
| found most philosophy "classics" painfully hard to get into.
| That doesn't mean they shouldn't be respected, but the truth
| is that sections of society (like myself) do rely on the
| people specializing in philosophy parsing it into current
| language and metaphor.
| red75prime wrote:
| Shouldn't this 236-year-old paper be updated in accordance
| with, say, neuroeconomics research on how provenance influences
| aesthetic taste?
| p0nce wrote:
| Nor the work of sociologists like Bourdieu's Distinction.
| kimjune01 wrote:
| would you let taste make withdrawls from your bank account
| Jtarii wrote:
| [flagged]
| mdwelsh wrote:
| 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 that matters anymore - as long as
| it works, who cares how it was built.
| hellojomp wrote:
| 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?
| stabbles wrote:
| People who care about their health aren't ignorant about
| that. I think that can apply to software too: if you care
| about safety or privacy you might think twice before using
| vibe-coded software.
| bijowo1676 wrote:
| 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"
| bijowo1676 wrote:
| 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"
| NathanKP wrote:
| That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is
| not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as
| Dario Amodei.
|
| The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways
| to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding
| tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking
| at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors
| that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use
| cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps
| where the code is straight up horrible.
| hellojomp wrote:
| A significant leap in logic is my middle name :) (I am
| not an AI)
| bijowo1676 wrote:
| how about tools like Lovable ?
|
| is Lovable used internally to create and improve Lovable
| product itself ?
| drowntoge wrote:
| > but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with
| skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the
| code
|
| It's hard to give something like "vibe coding" a rigid
| definition, but I think we can all agree that it's
| inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more
| I examine the code while building, the less the activity
| is about vibes.
|
| So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble
| anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool
| anymore either.
| lodovic wrote:
| I think babysitting the AI would be a better term than
| vibe coding. At work they call it "AI assisted
| engineering" and "synthetic coworkers"
| jatora wrote:
| Except AI corporations by and large all eat their own
| burgers (since any developer not leveraging agents
| effectively is woefully ignorant)
| jbxntuehineoh wrote:
| i have never had a "mcdonald's mcdouble", whatever that is. i
| cook my own burgers because i am a human being and i want to
| eat real food, not nauseating slop that should only be fed to
| livestock
| mshafir wrote:
| It resonated with me too, and even as a once fairly prolific
| coder that now uses agents to do all the coding, I feel like
| this is all relevant and does matter. The agent does whatever
| you ask and provides thin judgements based on what it thinks is
| your motivation and context, even feeding it the context it
| will often make bad generic choices. I think this is the part
| hard to optimize because it's not a verifiable reward, it's the
| feel of the software. I think Herdr is a great example, I've
| tried several dozen terminal multiplexers / session aggregators
| and they are all vibed and different, but this one felt so much
| better to use because of its choices and actually increased the
| number of parallel sessions I was able to keep going. My own
| projects I find I have to stress every detail, that is what
| makes the software good now is really diving into it, the
| experience feels like just as much of a craft as coding was and
| 'taste' captures the concept for me.
| swat535 wrote:
| For majority of people, including business executives it's the
| latter. No one cares about artisan code. Software is just a
| means to an end for them and not an art form.
|
| People treat their computers like any other appliance. They
| don't care if it's riddled with bugs, they'll gladly restart
| their computer or refresh the page at infinitum to get it to
| work.
|
| I think it's also why marketing and designers get more of a say
| in the software than engineers. UI polish matters more since it
| increases sales.
|
| This is the hardest thing to come into terms with in this
| industry.
| jatora wrote:
| Marketing and designers do not get more say in software. They
| get more say on the "surface", which we all know is 10% of
| the software.
| lugoues wrote:
| Yes but that 10% is all that matter to the people that
| matter to the business. Like a car, most people care about
| how it looks and how they interact with it... the only
| people who care what is under the hood, for the most part,
| are other engineers.
| timacles wrote:
| Would this apply to software that runs oil refinery plants,
| or video games or an fighter jet flight stabilization
| systems?
|
| Surely there is more to software than CRUD apps
| aprdm wrote:
| Of course yes, and it's even easier in some cases. Since
| there's a language that defines the functionality (e.g:
| formal methods) that the agent can use/veriy against
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| Time to load is perhaps one of the key metrics software is
| measured by because time to load directly relates to user
| action.
|
| Slower load times means user won't use the product, won't
| click the buy button, or will simply leave.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > they'll gladly restart their computer or refresh the page
| at infinitum
|
| They won't gladly do it. They'll do it begrudgingly because
| there is nothing better, or they have no choice, and they
| need to get their work done.
|
| Just because people use your AI-vomited garbage programs
| doesn't mean they like it.
| a2ff6eeb0 wrote:
| They chose to pay for it, which is about the same as liking
| it, as far as business needs go.
| lelanthran wrote:
| I'm quite sad that I have to disagree with you and agree
| with GP: if quality siftware mattered to people, Microsoft
| would have gone out of business a long time ago.
|
| If quality software mattered, javascript wouldn't be the
| most popular way to write desktop software.
|
| If users cared at all about quality software, we wouldn't
| have 800MB chat apps.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| > .. why marketing and designers get more of a say in the
| software than engineers.
|
| I hate it when visual designer do a product design or ux
| design job.
|
| I hate it when marketing just imagine some fake use case in
| their head.
|
| Market Research is real research. UX study is a real study.
|
| now everybody just vibe their job
| devin wrote:
| "as long as it works" is doing a lot of work here. Did the
| people building it say "no, again" enough times, and at the
| right times, in order to make something that _actually_ works
| instead of _merely_ works?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| The LLM has its own intuition and judgement which at this point
| is quite good. I'm not just throwing that around, I use LLMs
| 12-14 hours a day and for a long time reviewed atleast 75% of
| the code.
| QuiDortDine wrote:
| Perhaps you're the one making it work well?
|
| I've spent a day fixing a feature my very junior colleague
| pushed, and which was merged by my should-have-known-better
| colleagues who have almost as much experience as me.
|
| We have access to the same models. Why did her version suck
| and my features don't need fixing?
|
| There's still something there, thankfully.
| notashelf wrote:
| For what it is worth, I appreciate you sharing your experience.
| Looks like you have more programming experience than I have in
| life, so your comment matters to me. It also gets rather close
| to something I wanted to evaluate in the post: "whether any
| real intuition or judgment went into [its] design". I think
| that's a big question to dwell on these days.
|
| Ironically, though, I had written a post that had people
| debating whether _I_ put any intuition or judgement into. Would
| 've been real ironic to instead add a post-scriptum that said
| "Yep, none of it matters. I just slopped something in 5 minutes
| and it easily went to the frontpage. Look how easy it is!" but
| unfortunately that is not why I write, not what I intended to
| achieve, and not something I am equipped to do. I care about my
| work, which is why I care about your comment as well.
| GrayHerring wrote:
| Hard disagree on "Good enough", most things are mediocre at best.
| Despite the massive AI boom I can at best count on one hand
| "fresh" products made with AI that are meaningful in day-to-day
| usage. Not to mention most of them seem to be targeting AI-space
| itself instead of bridging some actual business use case. Just
| look at all the products on ShowHN, you can "tell" a vibed
| product in seconds.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Mediocre _is_ good enough, that 's what it means.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Mediocre literally means middling, which may or may not be
| good enough depending on requirements.
| jatora wrote:
| You are using countless products that are built or have become
| maintained by AI without realizing it apparently.
| Krei-se wrote:
| Name them. Just 2! Any example would be enough.
|
| Or well better than 0 and just a claim.
| kuschku wrote:
| I do notice and realize, and I've gotten to the point where I
| had to fork and patch most of them to fix the shitty AI
| generated code.
|
| It's so bad, and so _everywhere_ , that I'm genuinely
| considering switching to a pre-AI stable distro and waiting
| 10 years for the AI hyped to be over before updating any
| piece of software ever again.
| NothingAboutAny wrote:
| I'd believe it, my spotify breaks all the time now and I seem
| to remember them announcing none of their devs code anymore.
| not 10 seconds ago I had to force close it to get it to stop
| playing music on my phone.
| scotty79 wrote:
| If you are waiting for someone else to make a good product for
| you with AI, you are missing out. The best AI products have
| userbase of one.
| bjacobel wrote:
| The best AI products have a userbase of one. The average AI
| product has a userbase of zero.
| notashelf wrote:
| I think you agree with what is in the essence of the post, but
| has been worded poorly. I do agree that most things are
| mediocre at best. Hell, I'd argue that most of my comments on
| everyday observations are negative. Ranging from "this sucks
| :/" to "holy fuck". They are, however, "good enough" for some
| and despite how clever I must to notice how much something
| _sucks_ , that does nothing to the fact that it will receive
| adoption. Turns out I'm not clever. Huh.
|
| In hindsight, I have worded this rather poorly and let some
| phrases do _a lot_ of heavily lifting for me in the post.
| Ultimately, I agree with you. Knowing, for this instance, is
| not half the battle.
| aprdm wrote:
| How would you count them or even know if they were made with AI
| or not ? Such nonsense
| brap wrote:
| Everybody thinks they have good taste don't they.
|
| How convenient it is that we're all so awesome according to the
| one metric that can't be measured
| chasd00 wrote:
| yeah the skill du jour keeps shifting. Everyone wants to say
| they have something the llm doesn't. The more subjective and
| ill-defined that "something" is the better.
| benoau wrote:
| > Everyone wants to say they have something the llm doesn't.
|
| LLM can't waste weeks debating stacks and tools and then
| recast the problem as a new framework that needs to exist.
|
| * _Check mate_ *
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| I used to think the average HN reader probably did have good
| taste, at least above average. After all HN is a place for
| builders, making things. Most people never make anything.
| Making things means deciding what to make and how it should be,
| and also what not to make instead, so I think charitably HN
| probably does have higher average taste than random people or
| most other web forums.
| amberjack wrote:
| [flagged]
| causal wrote:
| It's also just patently false. Taste is not all that is left.
| Are software engineers really so full of hubris that they
| thought coding is all that there is to making a product?
| sparkling wrote:
| What is left? The second-best architecture for any given
| technical problem is, in the majority of cases, still good
| enough.
| Krei-se wrote:
| When all else breaks, absurd() is your friend.
|
| So i guess proven secure architecture will come and stay.
| dvt wrote:
| > 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.
| pydry wrote:
| Spewing out tons of boilerplate has always been the
| hallmark of a bad engineer.
| inigyou wrote:
| 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 function, automatically
| converting all the arguments and the return type. Then I
| left the company. How did my successors find it? No idea.
| Maybe they pulled out all the automation complexity and
| replaced it with manually operated boilerplate.
| dvt wrote:
| > 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.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| > 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.
| skydhash wrote:
| This pretty much, Emacs, Sublime, Vim, Jetbrain's IDE,...
| have snippet tooling solutions that are very
| configurable. And most unix editors support piping so you
| can easily write a programs for that. Or just a good old
| code generator.
|
| My goal when writing a software is always to reach a
| point where modifying a business rule is as easy as
| writing it in plain english. Which means abstracting the
| essential complexity (while being pragmatic).
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I think I am over opinion articles on AI, as a genre, in
| general.
| torginus wrote:
| Are you saying they are... tasteless?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _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.
| icedrift wrote:
| 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.
| kuschku wrote:
| That's where you're wrong. It sounds close to AI, but it's
| very clearly not AI generated.
|
| Let's look at
|
| > 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
|
| AI would've chosen rule of three (instead of 4 + etc),
| wouldn't have used the either at the end (doesn't fit into
| the rhythm), wouldn't have used "let me be plain" (more
| likely to use "let me be clear" or "let me be frank"), and
| wouldn't have chosen "Claude was not here".
|
| If you've actually read a lot of essays and AI generated
| text (and sadly, I have), it's very obvious that this was
| neither generated nor rephrased by AI.
|
| This is very much like the recent "kurzgesagt got banned by
| YouTube's AI detector" story, where the humans whose style
| was copied by AI now get accused of being AI
| choutianxius wrote:
| The Rick Rubin meme
| anupamk wrote:
| Oof :)
|
| The irony of OP championing for "taste" in the age of mass
| produced slop, only to then post something that was likely
| produced by repeatedly reprompting with "no, again"
| onion2k wrote:
| People will always want something to gatekeep their chosen field.
| Code went away, so now people need to be able to say if the
| machine wrote _good_ code. In a year or two people won 't be able
| to use that because the code will be measurably better than
| something a typical dev would write, and in five years it'll be
| better than anything _anyone_ could write.
|
| Then we'll need to accept that coding is better when it's done by
| computers, and we'll start telling everyone it's actually the
| prompts and context that steered the machine that _really_
| matter.
| qsera wrote:
| In couple of years data compression will have progressed so
| much that you ll be able to store all the data in the world on
| a floppy disk!
| madprops wrote:
| I tend to like images in a split second, when they try to achieve
| a certain aesthetic at least. I can later inspect them more
| carefully and understand why they're good.
|
| Reading text, it can either grab me or it doesn't. I've asked
| about that to an AI and there's some reason for that. Some text
| is more compatible with me, due to the rhythm or combination of
| chars/words used, how they actually look/feel, it's not just
| about the content. So I'm assuming some writers are going to be
| more compatible with me while others will make me dismiss them
| quickly or just skim.
|
| I like to think I have the correct objective taste in music, but
| everybody thinks that about themselves.
| robocat wrote:
| > later inspect them more carefully and _understand why they
| 're good_
|
| Reductionism is hard to apply to intuitions, and we often fool
| ourselves.
|
| I personally call this the obviously test: smart people
| _correctly_ notice something and say it is _obvious_. It is a
| rather rarer skill to understand and explain why. I have
| particularly noticed it with coaching (which adds the next
| levels of difficulty in getting someone to grok what you 've
| seen).
| bluegatty wrote:
| No, the AI is writing code not architecture. And it's the same
| for all disciplines.
|
| There will be no mass job layoffs for antying but relatively
| automatable stuff.
| whateveracct wrote:
| i type code by hand
|
| so emacs is also left :)
| inigyou wrote:
| My non-dominant hand is also left.
| Hasz wrote:
| Taste good, taste hard to cultivate, taste easy to fake and hard
| to prove. There, TLDR.
|
| We still have a metric for good taste, and it is $. Solve a
| problem that people care about? They give you $. Solve problem no
| one care about? No $.
|
| It is not perfect, but I challenge you to find a better metric
| that is as effective and simple.
| andyg_blog wrote:
| I think it's a pretty good direction to go down. I wonder if we
| can add a little more accounting to it. Cheap shoes solve an
| immediate problem but you pay more long term versus expensive
| well built ones. How much $ (in dev time + tokens) was spent in
| incidents and/or fixing code later. Credits and debits. Weigh
| money earned (somehow) against money spent.
| lackoftactics wrote:
| That could be true for novel problems from Deep Tech industries
| and not everybody can solve those.
|
| If you are doing another app, the product experience and
| marketing will probably win. Many companies with better
| products lost, beaten to death example is Betamax
| raver1975 wrote:
| Very well written, this gave me goosebumps. Full of flavor.
| dcre wrote:
| No! It's garbage!
| DrBrock wrote:
| I find this post disheartening. To my eye, it seems to be the
| author's first blog entry with obvious LLM contributions.
|
| Given the recent "moving to a farm" ... 7 days later ... "leaving
| the farm" posts, it's hard not to read this as someone clearly
| struggling with the burnout which is all too common in our
| industry, and resultingly giving in to the false promise of a
| machine that can just handle the thinking for you.
| vor_ wrote:
| They've updated the article to state that no LLM was used.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't believe them.
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's only because you'd rather believe that you are being
| lied to than mistaken.
| grey-area wrote:
| No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that
| LLMs excel in producing.
|
| Either they used an LLM or they have no taste and have
| used LLMs far too much elsewhere.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > No, because the writing is objectively bad in ways that
| LLMs excel in producing.
|
| Author does not dispute that. Yet they claim to not use
| AI. So your preferred belief is that they are lying,
| rather than a thing that looks AI written might have been
| actually written by a human and you are wrong thinking
| that it can't be true in this case.
| grey-area wrote:
| Yes that's right, I and many other readers think the
| author is probably lying when they say they didn't use
| AI.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The update itself has strong AI tells:
|
| > I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the
| reversals, the one-word lines--all of it. It's just the way
| it is.
|
| > That says something about my writing. It says nothing about
| who wrote it.
|
| > 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
|
| Either the author is doing this on purpose, or this is some
| kind of art project. I don't buy the "just a coincidence"
| story at all.
| ryeights wrote:
| Right, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading all the
| comments taking this article seriously.
|
| I think AI has broken HN. The readership is so head-in-the-
| sand about AI that they wouldn't recognize 2000 words of
| Claudeslop if it genuinely slapped them in the face
| raincole wrote:
| Most commenters only read the title. That's it.
|
| The alternative explanation (the top commenters actually
| read it and somehow didn't recognize it's obviously
| written with AI) is just too bleak and I choose to not
| believe that.
| yulker wrote:
| The whole post has that immediate LLM "mouthfeel"
| movpasd wrote:
| It's LLM-like in the details, but there are certain
| patterns of repetition and idiosyncrasies, also certain
| analogies I don't think an LLM would make (like the aliens
| thing), that make me believe that it's written by a human.
| gniv wrote:
| > To my eye, it seems to be the author's first blog entry with
| obvious LLM contributions.
|
| Not to me. It's actually quite sharply written. I enjoyed the
| style a lot.
| tfrancisl wrote:
| From my interactions with him in some nix forums online, he is
| not in the industry. This is hobby work (not to devalue it, as
| his software is generally high quality).
| hahahaa wrote:
| Going to drop this https://commoncog.com/the-tacit-knowledge-
| series/. Tacit experience gives you taste in my opinion.
| pnathan wrote:
| > 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.
| socketcluster wrote:
| 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.
| dimgl wrote:
| > I think AI slop code is going to be a much bigger problem
| than people anticipate.
|
| I'm seeing the same thing. Of course, it's always possible that
| AI capabilities grow significantly from here and this worry is
| moot (and there will be other things to worry about, like
| whether I'll have a job). But seriously, after a while AI
| generated codebases really fall apart.
|
| It's a bit of cope from me that this problem won't be solved in
| the future, but I'm also really disappointed with how many
| people really do not care about writing high-quality software
| that is easy to understand, performant, and resilient to bugs.
| Like, why did you decide to work on software in the first
| place?
|
| I think we're going to see some pretty careless mistakes in the
| future that will result in a lot of pain...
| socketcluster wrote:
| I'm feeling quite confident that AI won't be able to produce
| quality code in the foreseeable future. Because the
| bottleneck is not technology, it's people and incentives.
|
| Firstly, people don't agree on what good code is (developers
| who get paid by the hour tend to favor complexity so they
| think good code is complex code), secondly, AI companies have
| an incentive to produce more tokens; this works against good
| architecture since good architecture would cost fewer tokens
| to maintain. Thirdly, many decision makers tend to conflate
| complexity with intelligence, hence they are more likely to
| prefer complex solutions over optimal ones.
| drekipus wrote:
| This was a great and resonant post. Don't worry about the green
| names.
|
| I think there is almost a split between people who have read
| ZAOMM and people who have not.
|
| I recently made a post in my circles about how "meaning" is what
| human quality is. If you look at classical art a lot of it could
| look objectively nonsense and have technical mistakes, but just
| because the machine can make a picture does not mean that it
| attributes any meaning or communicate any intention. The
| difference between human-made classical artwork and machine-made
| classical artwork is the meaning and symbology behind it
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Speaking of taste the author basically tells me not to read the
| article immediately as soon as I hit the page because the
| commenters on this site (HN) have made them feel so bad about it
|
| I'm pretty sure it was not technology that killed the web it was
| the kind of toxic crap like that, that we're seeing from
| communities and that's nothing new
| jdanford wrote:
| It's because the writing reads like AI slop, and the author's
| note about how it's not AI slop ALSO reads like AI slop
| jopsen wrote:
| Taste will always be there.
|
| But toil is not gone. We have still have code owners, lawyers,
| physical hardware, thousands of configurations that we can't test
| them all.
|
| And notably: we will still be asked to write software we can
| maintain in the future.
|
| Sure, there are short-lived non-critical software projects where
| LLMs will rule.
|
| But for many big complex projects, you can't land code without
| reviews. You can argue its because taste is already being
| enforced in the name of maintainability.
| cautiouscat wrote:
| > But for many big complex projects, you can't land code
| without reviews.
|
| Why do you think orgs are pushing less reviews? Token-maxxing
| increased PRs but stupid meat brains are a constraint. So of
| course, remove that constraint and you'll have your features
| faster!
| jopsen wrote:
| Software engineering is and has always involved engineering
| situations where you can let your co-workers/third-parties
| run wild with limited review oversight and limited blast
| radius.
|
| Example: a plugin architecture with a solid API that makes
| degenerate behavior limited to usages of said plugin.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| Pangram classifies 100% of this text as AI-generated.
| vor_ wrote:
| The author claims no AI was used.
| ryeights wrote:
| He's lying.
| kuschku wrote:
| I disagree. It has none of the rhythm of AI generated text.
| Even humans that copy AI patterns adopt the AI rhythm at least
| on smaller scale.
|
| But this follows human structure and rhythm through and
| through, whether on the level of sentences, paragraphs,
| sections, or the whole text.
|
| I'd say it's handwritten.
| gaigalas wrote:
| If you need a full length blog post to explain it, it's not a
| good use of the word.
| jdzikowski wrote:
| When resources are scarce, you are forced to use them in a
| meaningful way. You learn to do only what matters most: what is
| right, minimal, essential. When you need to choose wisely when
| resources are scarce -- this is how you learn the taste.
|
| Now that creation is cheap, the scarcity has moved to adoption.
| Things built without taste are less likely to be adopted, to
| survive. At least that is what I'd like to believe.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Absolutely not. Scarcity forces you to do with what you have.
| Only in abundance, only when you can have everything, you have
| room and reason to develop taste.
| devin wrote:
| It is quite the opposite in my experience.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Who had historically the most taste? The rich or the poor?
| And who had the worst taste? The people who grew up in
| poverty mindset that got rich. These are widely shared,
| common cultural observations.
|
| You need a long term, persistent abundance to develop and
| even have a use for taste.
|
| I don't see why would software be any different.
| abixb wrote:
| I've run this thought experiment a number of times with different
| sections of my (relatively) diverse friend circle. I ask them a
| version of this question _on repeat_ : "what if AI automates X
| aspect of your work?", and the final answer (either because of
| frustration with the loopy nature of the question or a genuine
| stopping point) arrives somewhere along the lines of "my
| judgement," "my knack," "my embodied nature," or "my quality of
| decision making."
|
| I think the core still leads back to human agency and the ability
| to consider aspects that wouldn't fit into an LLMs limited
| context window or be able to be vectorized into a DB, including
| ultra-long-term consequences (especially those with great
| thinking abilities).
|
| I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to
| "fully" replace humans, because the evolutionary process that led
| to our cognitive abilities and the way we train LLMs are vastly
| different thanks to different pressures, but maybe that's just me
| defending the last bastions of our collective humanity as a
| human; I don't know what else to root for.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Right now we're all training AI models on our taste. All of our
| chat logs are being uploaded, and the AI companies are training
| the models on them to get them right the first time.
|
| It will soon no longer require taste. Or at the very least be
| 95% of the way there on the first run.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This was the basic theory behind Tesla eventually being able
| to stop killing Tesla drivers with FSD. It has not worked
| out.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Google also uses ML to train the Waymos, they just have
| better sensory capabilities. Lidar is much closer to how
| the human eye functions (inverted, I suppose) than cameras
| are anyway. But FSD is still really cool, you just have to
| make sure you don't take your hands off the wheel!
| red75prime wrote:
| I think it's obvious that repeatedly noting that the
| absolute perfection isn't achieved yet is an absolutely
| useless way of tracking progress. No?
|
| BTW, when was the last time Tesla driver died due to FSD
| fault?
| sublinear wrote:
| Judgment was all there ever was to begin with. It's why it's
| what God himself does, although I'd be curious if there are
| deities that don't involve judgment in some form.
|
| Anyway, I completely agree and the past several years have been
| an absurd journey into borderline psychosis with some people.
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| > somewhere along the lines of "my judgement," "my knack," "my
| embodied nature," or "my quality of decision making."
|
| Do your friends actually believe that AI can't automate these
| parts of their work? I think my answer would be that I'll just
| have to learn to do something else.
|
| > I still happen to think that AI/LLMs will never be able to
| "fully" replace humans
|
| Do you mean replace humans completely or just replace all the
| tasks humans don't want to do? I would hope that humans will
| still have a reason to live even if all the work is done by
| computers, and that the computers wouldn't intentionally wipe
| us all out.
| erelong wrote:
| I've been circling this insight for a bit previously, leading me
| to a convo with AI about how we are now approaching more of a
| spec - no, prompt - no, context - no, [insert newest paradigm]
| driven design approach
|
| The point being more that the development does weigh more heavily
| on having fun ideas to ask AI to build
|
| I think there's probably also a place for people to make guides
| for AI-assisted programming or even personal essays on their
| views of "taste" or what they want code to look like?
|
| I see pop up frequently objections to vibe coding (different from
| mere AI assistance in coding - vibe coding being creating things
| without looking at the code at all) that it doesn't account for
| architectural descisions, cybersecurity decisions, edge cases,
| and other such things. So to me it looks like a next step might
| be in identifying these things "vibe coding" doesn't do well,
| that people can learn more manually, so they can do at least AI
| assisted coding well.
| devin wrote:
| I think you missed the point of this article.
| catigula wrote:
| Honestly, a lot of people are denying this, but the latest models
| ARE at the point where their systems design generally surpasses
| mine because they have a better grasp of how the domain of any
| problem is typically solved.
| jdanford wrote:
| Have you ever considered getting really good at one domain in
| particular?
| boron1006 wrote:
| I don't like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that
| LLMs don't seem to work "good enough". They seem to be able to
| solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of
| 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn't seem to produce anything.
|
| One thing that I'm particularly frustrated with is the writing
| quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able
| to do, but I would say almost everything they write has almost no
| signal.
|
| Over a mid sized AI generated codebase that means I'm reading
| like 500 words to figure out what a module is even doing.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Since they can summarize, you'd really think they would be
| better at condensing their own output and cutting out the
| filler after. I wonder if you could use a specialized second
| pass for it or something?
| a123b456c wrote:
| Prompting is a skill.
| neerajsi wrote:
| In my recent experience it seems to be a contextual issue.
| Llms are constantly being dropped into new situations where
| they have to rediscover high level and cross cutting
| information about the system they're working on from
| contextual clues.
|
| The internal representations of this state and its projection
| back out to human language wouldn't be as concise as that of
| a practitioner or team that develop their own verbiage and
| ontology over time molded to their system.
|
| This verbosity might get better as we figure out better ways
| for agents to learn long term and use that knowledge to adapt
| to the users and projects over time.
|
| There might also be some good harness improvements we could
| consider like forked output streams or multiple long lived
| filter subagents to ensure that output appropriate for
| thinking is separate from code output and separate from
| output given to the user driving the session.
| ryoshu wrote:
| I like judgement. Taste is a subset.
| vasco wrote:
| For me taste is judgement about things that don't matter.
| Like you have taste in clothes. But a judge doesn't have bad
| taste when he makes a wrong decision, he has bad judgement.
| notashelf wrote:
| I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs are
| not "good enough", why are they still around?
|
| Obviously "good enough" was a poor pick of words of words on my
| behalf---and I'll gladly own it---but they should be "good
| enough" for _something_ if a significant amount of resources
| keep getting allocated to them. Yes on a very personal level
| you look at LLM-generated code and think to yourself "wow this
| is garbage" but what about the people, as pointed out many
| times in this thread, that simply do not care? Does that not
| count as "good enough"?
| SCLeo wrote:
| > I'll risk sounding antagonistic and ask you this: if LLMs
| are not "good enough", why are they still around?
|
| To quote the parent commenter:
|
| > They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem,
|
| but not long term
| notashelf wrote:
| But that means they're _good enough_ for the short them.
| This is why I find it such an interesting question to
| wield, but also, it is why my wording was poor in the post.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Short term can, IME, be _very_ short. I 've seen people
| generate, say, a bash script with an LLM. It's generated:
| short term, the problem is "solved": we've generated _a_
| bash script.
|
| ... but does it work? Someone comes along, reviews it,
| "this is garbage, and does not do what it says it
| purports to do". Perhaps it even gave an output: the
| script computed ... something, but it's just GIGO.
|
| But that "check if this works" friction _is the same
| friction_ that is what people try to avoid by generating
| it with an LLM in the first place. If you 're too lazy to
| write the script, you're practically by definition too
| lazy to verify it.
| aprdm wrote:
| You can have another agent write the tests and verify the
| former agent ? This is pretty basic stuff. Makes me
| question if people are actually trying to use AI
| habinero wrote:
| Now you have two problems lol, in that you don't know if
| the tests are any good or actually test the thing in
| question.
|
| Sooner or later you run out of turtles to put on the
| stack.
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| That's a solved problem, you just add another agent to
| check if the tests are any good, and one more to oversee
| the test-checker, and one more...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If this is your working environment, it sounds like quite
| an unusual place.
|
| I literally can't imagine generating a script with an LLM
| without testing it _at all._
|
| Bash is one of those situations where LLMs can do really
| well. No human on Earth can remember all of the commands
| and even fewer humans can remember all of the switches
| for all of the commands.
|
| This kind of remembering, searching, and assembling is
| exactly what LLMs are good at - as long as you're not
| writing a gigantic build system with hundreds of moving
| parts, in which case you should probably be using
| something more streamlined anyway.
| lmm wrote:
| > I literally can't imagine generating a script with an
| LLM without testing it at all.
|
| Then you're extremely unimaginative as well as unusually
| fastidious.
|
| Certainly someone - several someones - are generating
| lots of scripts and not testing them, given the PRs I'm
| seeing.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| Breaking down long term problems into small shorter
| problems we can solve one after another until the long term
| problem is solved is the essence of engineering.
| timacles wrote:
| No, the "essence" of engineering is having a cohesive
| vision for a larger plan.
|
| No quality large scale project can exist without it. And
| any seasoned engineer should understand by now that no
| SOTA LLM can produce quality engineering at scale.
| aprdm wrote:
| Lol. That's not true at all. And not how projects are
| done on startups or big companies.
|
| Execute fast or get nowhere, a series of small wins get
| you to live long term.
| dwattttt wrote:
| Long term projects that survived on short term wins are
| still around. But you're going to want to check how big
| the graveyard is of "project collapsed under tech debt
| from short term decisions" to see whether it's a good
| strategy.
| habinero wrote:
| Nah. You can succeed in every single individual thing but
| fail at the overall project because the parts don't align
| into anything that makes sense.
|
| If you need examples, look at game dev. There's plenty of
| games that have good execution but aren't fun to play or
| they're a confusing mess because there wasn't good
| overall direction.
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| Videogames are a weird comparison because they are
| basically the ultimate culmination of the combination of
| both engineering and art. The two can crossover in weird
| ways but still have distinct aspects that do not really
| compromise the other.
|
| Just because a videogame isn't fun doesn't mean there
| wasnt a cohesive engineering vision. God of War: Ragnarok
| is a good example of this. Excellent technical execution
| and (arguably) great direction but a terribly boring
| game.
|
| And many games that are terribly engineered are also
| incredibly fun. Dark Souls is a good example - runs like
| ass, looks very rough even by the standards of the time
| when the game released, with terrible enemy AI in a
| combat focused game - one might even call it a confusing
| mess (and I laugh at the notion that it doesn't have good
| direction)... despite all this it's a classic and
| arguably the most influential game since its release.
|
| Elden Ring carries a lot of legacy baggage from years of
| iteration on the same engine as ~~Dark~~ Demons Souls -
| and it's widely considered From Software's magnum opus
| and a masterpiece. Yet considering the scope of the game
| it is a great example of how small wins added up can
| solve large problems when executed with the skill and
| judgment gained from experience. So one might still
| consider it a success in terms of "engineering".
|
| Would From Software have been able to make the same game
| using Unreal Engine 5 built from scratch with dime a
| dozen "Unreal experts" brought in off the street? Not a
| chance. Want to know why western game development studios
| are suffering right now? Compare American layoff culture
| and race to the bottom economics to the retention rates
| of Japanese game studios like Capcom, Nintendo and other
| heavy hitters.
|
| For many of the most marvellous things humans have ever
| built, if you take a peak behind the curtain you'll still
| probably find some amount of duct tape and popsicles
| sticks somewhere keeping it all together.
|
| Fun, however, is a matter of taste and you can't engineer
| that.
| boron1006 wrote:
| It's a good question and I don't doubt they're useful.
|
| But I mean they're not good enough to do the things I need
| them to. Not enough that any difference can be chalked up to
| "taste".
|
| Put it this way, if you hired a very good handyman to build
| you a cathedral, you wouldn't stand looking at the
| smouldering wreckage of the construction site saying "oh well
| that's just a matter of taste".
| pornel wrote:
| They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can have
| quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away programs
| (where the lack of maintainability doesn't matter). We can
| solve some problems by brute force (keep trying until tests
| pass). For people who can't program, even bad code can do
| more than no code.
|
| LLMs are also useful as a natural language interface. They're
| pretty useful for search (as RAG and autoresearch, not the
| glue-on-pizza Google search crap). They're good for filtering
| and classification against rules that can be specified in
| natural language instead of special syntax or by training
| dedicated models.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > They're here, because even "bad" code has uses. We can
| have quantity over quality. We can generate throw-away
| programs (where the lack of maintainability doesn't
| matter). We can solve some problems by brute force (keep
| trying until tests pass). For people who can't program,
| even bad code can do more than no code.
|
| If this is an acceptable definition of software engineering
| productivity, where "quantity over quality" is prized, then
| hire me.
|
| Because I guarantee I can produce dozens of PRs daily, each
| having tens of thousands of LoC deltas (pick any language
| you desire), none of which having research and/or
| understanding underpinning them, and _all_ easily
| quantified as being "brute force."
| didibus wrote:
| There's a quote I forgot that says: "There is a Quality
| to Quantity".
|
| I think it was from a Chinese person, as they took
| manufacturing of cheap things, low quality stuff, but
| managed to scale it to mass quantities.
|
| I agree with that, it may not be reliable, full featured,
| well designed, ergonomic, etc. But quantity enables
| things and thus is a quality in itself. It allows use-
| cases that benefit from accessible cheap software. Those
| use-cases were not viable prior, because cost/time was
| prohibitive.
| frowaway4anoday wrote:
| Often attributed to Stalin in reference to the mass
| production focus of the Soviet war machine.
| https://quotees.co.uk/war/joseph-stalin-quantity-has-a-
| quali... When you treat scale as a design criteria, you
| get a different product
| Marha01 wrote:
| > Because I guarantee I can produce dozens of PRs daily,
| each having tens of thousands of LoC deltas (pick any
| language you desire), none of which having research
| and/or understanding underpinning them, and all easily
| quantified as being "brute force."
|
| I can guarantee that you cannot produce such PRs in the
| same quantity/quality than a modern LLM. The speed at
| which today's LLMs output code is superhuman.
| ReservoirPengui wrote:
| It's textbook historical revisionism. It's not like we
| didn't have mountains of bad code in the pre-LLM era. I'm
| old enough to remember endless complaint posts about
| having to wotk with legacy codebases full of horrible
| spaghetti code. Somebody took a long time to write it by
| hand.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| Have you realized you are attacking a straw-man? Nobody
| said all "hand written" code is good. I _think_ the
| implicit argument is: "all vibed code lacks cohesion".
| pornel wrote:
| I'm not happy about the drop in quality either, and I'm
| not advocating for just making software shittier.
|
| However, look at history of DSLR cameras vs mobile phone
| cameras. Mobile phones were always worse than large
| format cameras, and we've got a massive quantity-over-
| quality explosion in photos taken. It didn't replace
| professional photography, but let people upload photos of
| their lunch to social media.
|
| I think in programming we're getting frustrated because
| we're trying to naively use high-volume low-quality code
| generators in our previous low-volume high-quality
| workflows. We're still discovering what's the programming
| equivalent of bathroom selfies, photos of receipts and QR
| codes.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| One part of the answer is marketing it to people looking for
| an easy way out without having to do the work or thinking at
| all. There's value in that as shown in everything like things
| for the home that purport to make your daily life easier.
| LLMs market themselves in much the same way
| a2ff6eeb0 wrote:
| They're "good enough", but they're not good. If you're trying
| to run a business, programmer skill isn't worth the money you
| spend, LLMs are cheaper. If you care about the quality of
| what you produce, they're trash.
|
| Programming is no longer skilled labor. Quality is a hobby.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| If your business involves storing any kind of customer data
| or handling payments, you probably should still hire a
| programmer who at least reviews the results of your vibe
| coding. Getting hacked is bad for business.
| a2ff6eeb0 wrote:
| AI is just fine at security audits these days. It's
| better at finding bugs than it is at writing code,
| overall. You need to prompt for it, but that's not
| skilled labor.
|
| I'm also not sure getting hacked is so bad for business.
| Most businesses that got hacked seem to still be around
| just fine.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Conversely, if they are good enough, why do they degrade
| frome consuming their own output?
|
| How come humans consuming their own output gets better over
| time, but llms and any other form of ai consuming their own
| output only get worse?
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Yes on a very personal level you look at LLM-generated code
| and think to yourself "wow this is garbage" but what about
| the people, as pointed out many times in this thread, that
| simply do not care? Does that not count as "good enough"?
|
| Aside from the "amateur" qualifier, the Booch quote below
| provides insight to those questions: The
| amateur software engineer is always in search of magic,
| some sensational method or tool whose application promises
| to render software development trivial. It is the mark of
| the professional software engineer to know that no such
| panacea exist.[0]
|
| "Code" is shorthand for "encode", which can be defined as
| "encoding a solution to a problem", which implies knowing
| what problem to solve, and thus ultimately implying
| understanding of same.
|
| So "good enough" depends on the stakeholders' definition of
| that valuation.
|
| IOW, if a person tasked with delivering a solution can
| instead deliver garbage and still get paid for it, then it is
| "good enough" for some definition of same. If the people
| approving a person's remuneration are not satisfied with this
| type of work product, then the answer as to whether it is
| "good enough" or not will be quickly answered.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grady_Booch#Quotes
| chongli wrote:
| The use of "amateur" is indeed a very poor choice. An
| amateur is someone who seeks to master a skill or perform a
| craft for the love of the art, not for money. It's the
| professional who is looking for the shortcut, not the
| amateur.
|
| The amateur is the one who hones a tool's edge until it's
| razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail until
| they've found the essence of what they're trying to
| achieve. The work of an amateur is often highly impractical
| and uneconomical, but sublimely beautiful.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I think you are torturing this comparison by using
| different meanings of amateur and professional
|
| A professional does mean "someone who does something for
| money" but it also often just means "someone who is very
| good at something"
|
| Similarly, amateur does mean "someone who does something
| out of passion without wanting/needing to be paid" but
| also often just means "someone who is just starting out,
| is new at something, and is probably not good enough to
| be a (paid) professional doing it"
|
| You're talking about the "passionate" amateur and
| comparing it to the "getting paid" professional. I think
| many people talking about amateurs and professionals are
| mostly talking about "amateurs (newbs)" and
| "professionals (very experienced)"
| imtringued wrote:
| You just twisted the meanings of the words.
|
| An amateur is not a master nor a disciple of a master
| (e.g. future master).
|
| The vast majority of amateurs have no ambitions nor
| passion and simply give up early on, that's a rose tinted
| view.
|
| Since they don't get paid to do it, they have to allocate
| their precious free time toward the skill, which means
| they don't have those 40 hour weeks where they spend all
| their time honing their skill to begin with.
|
| Even someone who does a skill half heartedly without
| passion nor ambition is going to learn faster with those
| 40 hours at his disposal.
|
| >The amateur is the one who hones a tool's edge until
| it's razor sharp, and cuts away all unnecessary detail
| until they've found the essence of what they're trying to
| achieve.
|
| That's not an amateur and you know that. By your logic
| Japanese master craftsmen doing this are amateurs.
| agentultra wrote:
| The market logic isn't going to be defensible. The market is
| highly irrational and prone to be influenced by those with
| the most capital, not the, "invisible hand." Cars are
| freaking everywhere not because they are the best solution of
| transportation but because people with vested interest in the
| sale of oil and cars made it so by buying politicians,
| starting political and marketing campaigns, and on for
| generations. It took decades for the car to become the de-
| facto mode of transportation in North America let alone the
| rest of the world. It's not good for us. It's highly
| irrational to prefer cars when freaking wildfires and climate
| change threaten our very existence. In a similar vein, LLMs
| as they are, are not around because they are necessary and
| superior.
| KurSix wrote:
| "The market chose it" doesn't mean it was the best
| solution, just that it fit the incentives
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The current kind of car is extremely good at doing what it
| does. It's just that most of the benefits are short term,
| and for the car user (and the oil salesman), while the
| costs are borne by everyone else, and some of the worst
| ones are long term.
|
| (Some similarities to hard drugs here.)
| account42 wrote:
| Cars are actually the best solution to transportation once
| you stop ignoring inconvenient but real requirements like
| autonomy and isolation.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Cars are actually the best solution to transportation
|
| "the" is the error here.
|
| There's places and people for whom cars are so. There's
| other cases where public transport covers the people
| while business-owned vans cover deliveries of bulky
| items, which is essentially how I've lived the last 8
| years, though for "bulky" I should note I've seen someone
| take an actual kitchen skink on public transport here in
| Berlin.
|
| I've also found some islands here Berlin with no bridge
| connection to the mainland and hence no practical use for
| a car at those locations; that said, my main reference
| for "car free" domiciles would be Sark:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sark
| polotics wrote:
| Cars are not a system.
|
| You need roads, traffic lights, drivers and pedestrians
| that respect rules, not too many holy cows in the way,
| not too much CO2 in your quasi-self-sustaining spaceship,
| lungs and livers that can deal with the soot, a tolerance
| for high-velocity impacts risks, not too many other cars
| around, ...
| didibus wrote:
| I'd agree with the OP you are responding, what he means is
| that this isn't just about taste. It's that the code, while
| it works, and the text, while it has the ideas in it, is
| still not to the level of a human author. It's not that it
| isn't tasteful, in the sense of having the flair of specific
| author X, but it is verbose, goes around the point to get to
| it, etc.
|
| Taste seems to imply an art, but I don't think we're at the
| point of cleverness, of LLM innovating a new beautiful
| programming paradigm or pattern out of immaculate taste for
| code. We're just talking more basic, even bad devs have more
| terseness, more clear intent in their prose and code, etc.
|
| It's "good enough" for many use-cases, but it could be
| better, even before expecting the most beautifully clear code
| from the best devs out there, it has not reached the level of
| the average one in readability and clarity of expression
| (both code and prose). That annoys the author, he has to
| intervene manually to trim all the fat, and therefore not
| "good enough".
| samiv wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you but the "resource allocation" which
| I presume to hint at the fallacy that capitalism is somehow
| great or optiomal at allocating resources is not really true.
| Just look at any big company such as meta and see how much
| inefficiency and bad choices there is.
|
| Stock market as a measuring stick is completely irrational.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Facebook/Meta is a great example indeed when one remembers
| that they took part in a genocide, and still haven't faced
| consequences for it.
| nunez wrote:
| Because if you criticize the LLMs, you get headbutted into
| the Dante's Inferno that is the current job market
| bigbuppo wrote:
| There's the hope that they'll make all employees redundant
| and that businesses that adopted AI quickly will be able to
| exist as a pure money-printing entity without the liabilities
| of products, customers, or employees.
|
| Put another way, LLMs are just another part of
| enshittification.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| > if LLMs are not "good enough", why are they still around
|
| They are not good enough yet, the people using these tools
| every day, and with a high bar for quality and design 'taste'
| notice the rough edges.
|
| They are still around because LLMs are plenty good enough for
| casual consumers, but where 'taste' really starts to matter
| in design or in writing, the rough edges show up much more
| obviously and users who have been working with these tools
| feel it immediately.
| dwedge wrote:
| The market desperately wants to replace wages and the idea of
| a machine doing the work you previously needed to do before
| is so enticing, and the initial results so promising, that
| the rest doesn't matter.
|
| Look at how many AI lay offs there already were a year or two
| ago - back when almost everyone would agree they weren't good
| enough. If good enough didn't matter then does it matter how
| when AI is better?
|
| And despite what you might be trying to prove, it's obvious
| I'm replying to an LLM (a green account at that), but it's
| not for you, I don't expect you to bother reading it.
| esikich wrote:
| This is just a problem of articulating what you want. Most
| people can't write for shit, I'm sorry. Because they maybe took
| one writing class in college. It's a skill in it's own. LLMs
| write better than anyone I've ever worked with and the reasons
| are obvious. If it rambles or is too "purple", that's on the
| person prompting it, because they can't write for shit to begin
| with.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with
|
| And yet every time I see AI-written documentation, there's
| paragraphs worth of throat clearing and space-wasters like
| the word "genuinely" for things that could have been outlined
| in a couple of bullet points.
| nunez wrote:
| I'd much rather see badly written text that someone invested
| time into instead of perfectly written and infinitely
| soulless AI slop
| kuschku wrote:
| Then why is it that ALL content generated by LLMs, no matter
| who prompted it, is of such low quality?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > LLMs write better than anyone I've ever worked with
|
| If you're talking about prose, this is obviously false. All
| the LLM prose I see is so mentally fatiguing to read that I
| usually just give up.
|
| There are no lack of examples of poorly written LLM prose.
| CM30 wrote:
| I think there are really two types of use cases for LLMs here,
| and people that get value out of them.
|
| First are those that care very little about the quality of the
| work, or the process behind it, and just want a 'finished'
| product no matter what. These are many of the folks vibe-coding
| everything without even looking at the output, and a
| depressingly number of those getting hacked or what not.
|
| But hey, if you've got an idea for a complex app or website but
| no interest in actually building it, an LLM will get you...
| something vaguely like what you wanted.
|
| Second are small projects and small sections of existing ones,
| most of which easily fit inside the LLM's context window. If
| you're making a fairly basic WordPress plugin or React
| component or one page website, an LLM will probably be able to
| handle it just fine. Heck, it might not even look all that
| different from what a human might have created code wise.
|
| One of the big issues we have those is that plenty of people
| and companies are using these tools despite having requirements
| that aren't met by them in the slightest. If you're working on
| a Google/Microsoft/Meta scale product where performance and
| security and code quality are of the utmost importance, then an
| LLM isn't going to be a great fit. Unfortunately, that's
| exactly where this technology is being used, and the results
| are becoming more and more obvious.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| I've started requiring that unless absolutely necessary, all
| comments and docstrings be one-liners in our code 10k+
| codebase(s). LLM-generated code has a tendency to "over-
| justify", which is reasonable when first reviewing the code as
| a human.
|
| But then, once it's passed the first human it should be
| considered human-to-human communication rather than LLM-to-
| human communication, and the long, winding, and often repeated
| justifications can be significantly condensed.
|
| Also you can't let it run loose with unit tests unless you want
| to be blasted in the face with hundreds of lines of absurd test
| fixture preparation.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm really not convinced that the word "taste", as used in these
| type of AI discussions, refers to any meaningful concept. The AI
| that wrote this blog post (look at footnotes 2 and 3!), like many
| others, is great at defining what it is _not_ and how people
| psychologically relate to it, but I 've never seen a clear
| definition of what it _is_.
|
| My best guess is that it's a pointer not to any actual concept
| but to latent semantic space between concepts. Either a very
| novel or very Buddhist phenomenon, depending on how you look at
| it.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I think the "taste" described here actually can be formulated as
| a measurable quantity, just one that can't be accurately measured
| _in practice_. According to James Shore 's 2006 essay "Quality
| With a Name" [0], "good design" amounts to nothing more or less
| than minimising the _expected_ engineering time needed to create
| a good enough product over the space of changes that are likely
| to be needed during its lifetime (I 'm paraphrasing slightly).
| Realising this was a revelation to me. I would argue that OP's
| "taste" is Shore's "good design".
|
| This conclusion may be unwelcome here, since it implies that AI
| _can_ acquire "taste".
|
| [0]: https://www.jamesshore.com/Articles/Quality-With-a-Name.html
| notashelf wrote:
| I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to conclude AI _can_
| acquire what I have described, and would continue to defend as
| taste. The real question, then, could be whether its acquired
| taste renders you obsolete? So what if you can be replaced,
| what then? A question that popped into my mind is whether
| taste, as immeasurable as a metric as it is, would be what
| keeps you relevant _just enough_ to matter.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Unpleasant as it would be, I think it may well render us
| obsolete in the main. There will probably always be a handful
| of paid human programmers around, just as there will probably
| always be a handful of people paid to make buggy whips, but
| the history of capitalism shows that _most_ buyers don 't
| care enough about how their goods and services get made to
| pay the premium that would keep "handmade" items economically
| viable for sellers. So I don't yet see a compelling reason
| why ~all of us programmers (and all other white collar
| workers in their turn) won't be replaced by LLMs.
|
| The only difference I see between what happened to master
| craftsmen during the Industrial Revolution and what is
| happening to programmers today is that I belong to the latter
| group, so for the first time, the coming employment crisis
| feels personal.
| madrox wrote:
| We've been talking about taste for a year now as it relates to
| AI, so I'm going to counterpoint it: if competitors can reproduce
| your features, UX, and visual decisions within days, your taste
| is not really an advantage. How many apps implemented pull down
| to refresh once one person did it? How many people even remember
| (or care) whose taste spawned that UX pattern? [1]
|
| AI is not inaugurating an age of taste. It is shortening the
| half-life of taste and commoditizing software. What happens when
| software features, UX, and visual fidelity aren't competitive
| advantages anymore? If you ask me, it looks like business did in
| the 90s. We'll probably see the return of department store
| software in the next few years.
|
| 1: for the record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
| derangedHorse wrote:
| It's not about being the only person doing it, it's about
| choosing to include it. Many don't know what works and what
| doesn't. Being able to discern a set of features that are
| cohesive to a smooth experience is taste. Innovating and
| establishing oneself as the first person to deliver those
| experiences is a moat in itself.
| nullbio wrote:
| Competitors can reproduce your discernment as well, it's the
| sum of your product and can be equally cloned. So how is this
| a moat?
| dingaling wrote:
| Because reproduction is reactive. If an organisation only
| clones others' style then they'll always be behind the
| curve and will be widely recognised to be derivative and
| lacking their own 'taste'.
|
| Look how long it takes Chinese brands to transition from
| being clones to establishing their own corporate image.
| dmarcos wrote:
| Also Microsoft couldn't match Apple taste with effectively all
| resources in the world. And they really tried.
|
| True taste is interesting because is more like a worldview, a
| modus operandi, a continuous process... those are harder to
| replicate.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Funny you mention Apple because they are proof that taste can
| be king. Yeah they also kidnap their users into their
| ecosystem and make smart business decisions, but what really
| differentiates them is taste. And Microsoft is sort of the
| counterpoint. There's more than one way to succeed I guess.
| kazinator wrote:
| Or, used to be proof.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apple's taste during the 1990's almost killed the company.
| imhoguy wrote:
| Because let's admit it, later it was a taste of one guy
| who got another "chance" or the company got a "chance" to
| be lead by him. Now as he is gone the company still
| carries that taste legacy with better or worse results.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| It's not that the machines were ugly or badly designed
| (albeit not as good as the 80s heyday), but they were
| unable to compete on price/performance and OS tech stack,
| and that in turn was making them uncompetitive in
| application support, which would likely have killed them.
|
| It's an interesting alt history - who would have won with
| no Apple around? I reckon we'd all own a lot more Sony
| and Nokia gear, it's possible the Cambrian explosion of
| weird featurephone form factors would have carried on a
| lot longer, perhaps the black rectangle form factor would
| never have won out.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Apple the company that was rescued from bankruptcy 30 years
| ago due to a miracle, yeah taste gets nowhere without a big
| bank account.
|
| Lets see if they will mostly sell iPhones to the end of their
| time now.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| That's because Microsoft understood taste as aesthetic - "we
| can put it in a pretty box", rather than ethic - fundamental
| to the process of making the product.
|
| Most of their endless UI/UX fails are organisational in
| nature, no amount of design can create beauty from an org
| structure which generated stupid requirements.
|
| And nobody there cared enough or had enough power to force
| the org into a shape compatible with Apple-level design
| outcomes.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Microsoft was superior in both in the windows 95-2000 era,
| and with Metro (on phone, on desktop it was half-assed). The
| problem was when they started to try matching Apple, instead
| of staying true to the core of their own aesthetics.
|
| Both the Fisher-Price XP style which was bot zeitgeist, and
| an attempt to answer for the skeumorphic tragedy apple was
| pursuing, and the recent floats, spacings, central taskbar
| mimichking the dock, etc...
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything
| Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and
| interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really
| find that nor see it with others.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| I used Windows Phone, and it was great, minimal,
| intuitive, and prodcutive for most usecases I had (email,
| texting, calls, maps/navigation, banking, listening to
| music, light productivity, taxi). It did not fit the
| gimmicky ad ridden hellscape we live in now, I'm not sure
| how it got so far in Microsoft. Possibly from some old
| memories of living of selling products instead of
| creating addictions and selling data of the addicts.
|
| Version 7 and 8 were great UX-wise, I have mixed memories
| about 10, mostly performance regressions bugged me, but
| was still faster than most non-flagship androids of the
| time... yet sometimes it felt sluggish to WP7 on potato
| hardware. The typography based UI was both fast and very
| readable and focused for well thought out apps. The
| standardized navigation buttons (on android button order
| may vary be vendor/model), and the clear gesture based
| navigation instead of hidden intearctions everywhere
| (long press, 3d press, app switching gestures etc), but
| using gestures for in-app navigaton were all easy to
| understand and grasp even by the elderly.
|
| It was readable, well organized, nobullshit, but that is
| not what the masses crave. Metro was like how a "dumb
| smartphone" should be, in my opinion.
|
| On desktop ot didn't work well. The live tiles were still
| a good idea, and if the taskbar supported them, it might
| have been a good idea (or not, was not tried, but could
| have be a bit like the old NeXT style refined, not
| stagnated and skeumorphized like on the mac).
| petra wrote:
| Microsoft's taste was "good enough". They lost because of an
| app ecosystem, and because of Apple's brand power, the same
| way beautiful Chinese shoes will lose to Nike.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Nokia was able to match and surpass Apple in taste on all
| fronts with their N9 phone and MeeGo OS. So it is possible,
| but how to do it I couldn't tell, since all large
| organizations are saturated in corruption.
| kaizenb wrote:
| "What happens when software features, UX, and visual fidelity
| aren't competitive advantages anymore?"
|
| This is the question I've been thinking about. All can be
| copied very easily and in scale these days.
| phito wrote:
| It was always easy to copy software (but yes, even easier
| now). The hard part is competing with the software that
| you're copying. Software does not exist in a vacuum. They
| usually have an already established user base, relationships
| with partner businesses, more domain knowledge due to having
| to actually think about the problems they are solving and so
| on.
|
| You can start by copying but at some point you'll have to
| differentiate, and you might not be able to do so if you
| don't understand how your sloppy vibe-copied software works.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ironically given how much hate I have seen for them, this is
| what patents are for.
|
| Invent something novel, get patent, you have exclusive
| economic rights to that for however long the patent lasts.
| remify wrote:
| Copying means you have a valid target.
|
| I'd argue that a well thought UX isn't easy to copy in the
| first place because it's not something that can easily be put
| into word.
|
| It's the same for a lot of things, I have some clothes that I
| love because of their, design, quality and more ... something
| intangible that I have hard time describing and that can
| easily be explained with: It was done with taste.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| Imagine if artists were embracing AI the same way coders were
| being forced to. All that would be left there is taste, and
| your argument applies as readily there as well.
| kazinator wrote:
| Dumbest idea ever. You are composing some text in a form, or
| filling in fields. You want to scroll up just a little to see
| something out of the viewport. Oops, your little swipe is
| misinterpreted as a refresh gesture: the input is gone.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, it's infuriating when poorly implemented.
| kazinator wrote:
| I think it's impossible for it not to be poorly implemented
| because the gesture is inherently ambiguous (or becomes so
| when you overload it).
|
| I think what "poorly implemented" actually means for touch
| screen gestures is to be lacking the customizability to
| reassign or disable infuriating behaviors.
|
| Gesture configurability is nonnegotiable: when implementing
| gestures, have the configuration system in place first and
| make sure every single behavior is tied to a preference.
| chanux wrote:
| Loren Brichter [1]
|
| Never thought of finding out who until you mentioned! What a
| small but fantastic contribution! Thanks Loren!!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull-to-refresh
| chanux wrote:
| PS: Think about the next evolution of it, the auto refresh
| (from the great apps Instagram and LinkedIn).
|
| Did I use the word evolution right?
| _luci_ wrote:
| Id argue that auto refresh is more a successor than an
| evolution!
| thn-gap wrote:
| I found this post yesterday on this exact same topic. As
| someone who is interested in the space of creating visual
| things and its design choices, it's a bit disheartening to see
| the current situation, and brings you to the point of "why even
| try doing anything anymore" rather than just follow the
| copywagon.
|
| I feel this will be a similar effect to the current slowdown of
| hiring of juniors: you're killing the pipeline of future
| seniors that lead development.
|
| https://xcancel.com/shadcn/status/2085163855408214356
| broodbucket wrote:
| That's not really what I think of when I think of taste in
| software development. I think of taste more in the sense of how
| to go about architecting something, what problems are worth
| solving, what technologies should be used, how to structure the
| code and documentation, how the APIs should function, what the
| scope of the thing should be, knowing what to do and what not
| to do, yada yada. That's all taste and LLMs suck at it (noting
| that taste is very subjective).
| uludag wrote:
| I think the point is without taste you wouldn't even know what
| things should be copied out of the countless competitors. How
| would you even know in the first place if a competitor did a
| particular thing tastefully without a good sense of taste
| yourself?
|
| Also, there are a lot of areas where taste will absolutely
| reign supreme (and has been), especially anything related to
| media or entertainment (books, articles, videos, games, music,
| etc.)
| pizzly wrote:
| I can see a possible future where taste is automated. If you
| can effortlessly make 1000s of iterations then you can test it
| on real people 1000s of times. The ones that do better you
| keep.
|
| Another possible future is that taste is not automated but its
| not part of the designer's job (if designers still exist).
| Instead some AI will generate 1000 of iterations and people
| will be employed to evaluate 100s of software UI each day for
| taste. These will be taste farms if you like. These people full
| time job will be saying yes or no.
|
| Other possible futures also exist.
| lackoftactics wrote:
| That's interesting there was creativity experiment results
| proving that could be true.
|
| https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-
| quality...
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Couldn't disagree more. AI is a button that you press and
| magically get results. The ability to judge the quality of
| those results is "taste".
|
| Anyone can push the button, but not everyone can discern
| whether the result is a good one or not. That skill is either
| learned or to some extent inherent in one's abilities.
|
| My example I've been thinking about is: what will be the first
| new, big programming language in the age of LLMs?
| Theoretically, anyone could go out and make it right now. The
| skills and expertise required are well-encoded within all of
| the frontier models. The thing is, without taste, the language
| devolves to a useless state rather quickly. On smaller scales,
| I've seen this with API design and even object oriented design.
| I've also seen it in AI generated images and music: devoid of
| taste, and numbingly facile and generic.
|
| Edit: not to toot my own horn, but "numbingly facile and
| generic" funny enough is probably a phrase that an LLM would
| never create without significant prompting to refine writing
| style.
| cowboylowrez wrote:
| These artsy fartsy takes on a subject that would be better
| studied as a science are fun but are they useful? I am not saying
| there is no such thing as taste and neither will I attempt to
| define taste except to say "tasteless" is probably the opposite.
| "Judgement" seems more valuable as some have mentioned, maybe
| judgement and taste together identify something we want?
|
| Still, I like better when we actually do try to name what we're
| talking about. We've probably all read the motorcycle guys take
| on quality and things like that right? I guess the theme some are
| going with is that quality can't be objectively quantified and to
| define it is futile but I've never liked that take. If we think
| LLM generated code is low quality then it certainly makes sense
| to start our attempts to define or at least describe what makes
| the quality needle move, because language is how we encode lots
| of information and information is what feeds LLMs.
|
| People also like to rag on uncle Bobs takes, clean code, etc but
| I like how at least he tried. I've been a fan of his for awhile
| but I'm not big on objects so don't care about his pushes on that
| sort of thing. The best take that offered hints that I would call
| quality is "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout,
| there is plenty of stuff in this short little book that was very
| satisfying to me, like for instance where Bob wants short/small
| functions, Mr Ousterhout was much more flexible on this, like for
| instance maybe some functions can be bigger if the need arises,
| things like that.
| asdewqqwer wrote:
| But this is basically reinventing the term "Aesthetics" which is
| a field that had several centuries of philosophy research about
| it. Not all of them will agree AI cannot have it.
|
| Actually I think it is possible to reconcile Kant's third
| critique with the statement "LLM is possible to make aesthetic
| judgement" (with certain generous application of principle of
| charity, naturally).
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| AI does have something like Aesthetics and taste, but it's the
| average of all the inputs and so it's almost by definition the
| answer to 'what is the most average design possible based on
| all human prior data inputs?'
|
| That's why AI prototypes of front end UIs tend to look the same
| without massaging them with your own design tokens, design
| language, and injecting your own taste.
| easygenes wrote:
| Oof, even the post-mortem promising none of it is AI slop is
| obvious AI slop.
| attheballot wrote:
| I was expecting them to state that they were doing a bit with
| the post-mortem, but the punchline never came. It is even more
| consistently AI coded than the full text. Give us a /s, give us
| a wink a nod, give us a markdown sygil of LOSS.png, anything
| that says "I am actually a human", because all that reads as is
| BEEP BOOP KILL ALL HUMANS.
| infinitebit wrote:
| I agree with the idea that the taste, for lack of a better word,
| was the only thing that ever mattered. What I disagree with is
| the idea that slop that is "good enough" is indistinguishable
| from something that is crafted is "indistinguishable by the
| market". I think it is indistinguishable in the short term, but
| very distinguishable on a long enough time span. The same way
| that hacked together slop has always been "good enough" to close
| a ticket and even get someone a promotion, but later costs the
| company thousands of engineering hours to rewrite once it becomes
| completely unreliable, slow and impossible to modify. We're just
| speed running that now. It's the same battle engineers with
| "taste" have been fighting with sales teams and product managers
| and lazy teammates before LLMs, just in fast forward.
| prokopton wrote:
| Whenever I see "is doing a lot of work here", I assume it's AI-
| generated.
| bitgeist wrote:
| My taste agrees with the point made but thinks this could've been
| a shorter article
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This post makes two mistakes.
|
| The first is an XKCD 605 (Extrapolating). The author makes bold
| predictions for the future as though they're inevitable, but
| gives zero evidence, because there is none, we're still at T=0.
| IBM is still in business. Wake me up when it's been taken out by
| someone vibe-designing a mainframe in kicad. Or even, let's see a
| dropbox clone get off the ground. Should be easy, right? (It's an
| HN tradition, after all.)
|
| The second mistake is mistaking a large multiplier for infinity.
| The cost of code has not "collapsed to almost nothing" as the
| author claims. Talk to your CTO/CFO if you want the real story.
| They're probably freaking out over AI spend. But the point is,
| yes, AI has made things cheaper, but they didn't become
| monotonically zero.
|
| AI had also raised the bar. You can't ship "good enough" anymore,
| it has to be great. And great still takes time. Time in QA, time
| obsessing over every workflow, time talking with customers and
| planning features.
|
| Taste hasn't even entered the picture, and the analysis is
| already wrong.
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| > dropbox clone get off the ground
|
| Thats exactly what Im working on:
|
| - web client: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
|
| - desktop sync: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive
|
| In line with the infamous top comment during their launch, it
| does of course support FTP as a storage, and the other way
| around exposing your Dropbox as a FTP server, while supporting
| theme so you have a similar look and feel as well:
| https://www.filestash.app/img/screenshots/theme_dropbox.png +
| tons of stuff Dropbox never did
| soundworlds wrote:
| We have the Power of gods. Now we need the Wisdom of gods.
| soundworlds wrote:
| Also just a shout out to the author - you're getting a lot of
| flak here, but your article hit me at the right time in the right
| way. I trust you're telling the truth about writing it yourself,
| and thank you.
| agentultra wrote:
| > I do not miss the wall, and I will not pretend to.
|
| The wall is the point, if you want to truly know the truth of
| something. I still believe there is no royal road. _Taste_ isn't
| the answer to why you would choose a bump allocator over a slab
| when designing a system. It is experience, wisdom, and the long
| hard road of trying yourself and failing. Taste comes after.
|
| There is much joy in suffering when the result is knowing.
|
| Too many people have tried to declare victory over software
| engineering prematurely and it shows.
| anupamk wrote:
| I found this post a bit too verbose and incoherent. It does read
| like AI slop to me, but the bigger issue is that its core
| argument itself seems flawed.
|
| The author seems to be advocating for choosing to "carry the
| burden" of one's taste (or aesthetics, judgement, standards, etc)
| while bemoaning that the market may not sufficiently reward for
| doing so.
|
| IMHO, the core flaw is in mixing these two things 1) the market
| rewarding what it chooses to reward; and 2) individuals choosing
| to pursue some external/internal rewards.
|
| I broadly agree with the premise that Gen AI has lowered the cost
| of software development and, as a result, the quality of the idea
| and its execution have become more salient differentiators than
| just the ability to bring an idea to reality. I also agree that
| pursuing one's own sense of taste/judgment or "objective
| function" is often intrinsically rewarding and worth it. But
| ultimately, an individual has to decide how much they want to (or
| need to) play for the external market rewards vs their own
| intrinsic rewards/motivations.
|
| But I don't think it's coherent to argue that the market "ought
| to" reward one for their oh-so-special but mysterious, amorphous,
| and unmeasurable way of doing things, or that pursuing one's own
| taste/judgement is somehow automatically an exercise in
| greatness.
| strken wrote:
| I think there's a coherent argument lurking in there, but the
| author hasn't refined it enough. Here's my attempt.
|
| _The industrial revolution seemed like the end of the artisan
| as an important man in his community, the death of good taste,
| and an apocalypse for professions like furniture makers._
|
| _And yet, do you remember the Aeron chair, darling of the
| dotcom era startup? The Eames chair, that wood veneer
| conversation piece which every real estate agent chooses when
| staging an apartment? In an era of mass production, taste moves
| up the market, but it never quite goes away._
|
| _Where does that leave our taste, dear reader? I am not sure.
| What I do know is that, just as the Aeron chair could not exist
| in a world without mass production, so too will there be
| tasteful software which cannot exist in a world without LLMs. I
| hope you 're as excited as I am to build it._
|
| I have no idea whether this was the actual intent, but it's
| where the disparate little facts seem like they might lead.
| anupamk wrote:
| > In an era of mass production, taste moves up the market,
| but it never quite goes away.
|
| I agree with the points in your version, and the part above
| is the "meat and potatoes" for me.
|
| I too am unsure about how much did the author intend to say
| something similar.
|
| The main area where I disagree with the original post is this
| apparent fusing of subjective/personal taste driven value and
| market rewards driven value.
|
| To summarize/clarify my view using the Aeron and Eames chair
| examples from your version
|
| 1. I agree that someone had to pursue their taste/vision for
| those products even when they could've "gotten away" with
| producing something mass produced and mediocre. And that
| pursuing their taste/vision likely became more feasible once
| the technology allowed them to focus on the "taste" while
| taking care of the boilerplate.
|
| 2. But, I will also add that the market actually saw value in
| Aeron and Eames chairs and rewarded their creators. It
| would've been incongruent for those creators to assert that
| their chairs were superior merely because they chose to
| pursue their taste/vision.
| HeartStrings wrote:
| Humans will become the great filters.
| sgt wrote:
| AI slop that's also simply wrong. Flagged.
| foundart wrote:
| It's an interesting article. To me it reads like someone who is
| not confident in their writing, but is very interested in getting
| their idea across, iterated with an LLM to produce it.
|
| It set off all my LLM writing triggers and I noped out after
| about 3 sentences, because I'm designing/coding with AI all day
| and I'm 100% sick of its writing. I don't really care if it was
| written by an LLM or a person who writes in LLM style.
|
| HOWEVER, the surprising fix for me was to ask a number of LLMs to
| summarize it. I omitted the "is this AI slop?" parts when I
| pasted it in. Like I said, I don't care about who wrote it, but I
| hated the writing style.
|
| The AI summaries were quite readable.
|
| They converged at a high level on the summary, but with a good
| bit of variance in nuance. I had a good follow up discussion with
| one of the LLMs, so I'm glad I tried it.
| Petersipoi wrote:
| You hate LLM writing, so you took human written words and ran
| them through an LLM to read it?
|
| Hate to break it to you, but you don't hate LLM writing.
| KurSix wrote:
| Generating the first version is almost free now. Understanding
| why that version is subtly wrong, debugging it in production,
| maintaining it six months later and deciding whether the
| abstraction was a mistake are all still expensive...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. The Fable oneshot is a myth, the software will still
| require constant refinement and maintenance. I've been daily
| driving my "vibecoded" projects and they're never really
| finished, there's always something to do.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the
| greatest composer known to me either in person or by name; he has
| taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of
| composition.
|
| Haydn to Leopold, 1785
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haydn_and_Mozart#The_%22Haydn%...
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| Wow does it feel good to read human prose again. It just feels so
| - refreshing. Like cold water in a desert
| nunez wrote:
| > The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The
| friction was _the curriculum._
|
| Prescient.
|
| I really have no idea how future software engineers will know how
| to write software in a world wherein software is written for them
| wholesale.
| yen223 wrote:
| What's special about the fleshy brain that a digital chip cannot
| replicate its judgement?
| vdbijl wrote:
| It reminds me of I think Nietzsche, isn't it a quote of him? "In
| the end all that's left to us is taste"? I can't seem to find it
| so quickly, so maybe my memory is failing me. He definitely had a
| lot to say about taste.
| Witosso wrote:
| A poem by polish poet which say exactly this.
|
| TASTE
|
| For Professor Izydora Dambska
|
| It didn't require great character at all our refusal disagreement
| and resistance we had a shred of necessary courage but
| fundamentally it was a matter of taste Yes taste in which there
| are fibers of soul the cartilage of conscience Who knows if we
| had been better and more attractively tempted sent rose-skinned
| women thin as a wafer or fantastic creatures from the paintings
| of Hieronymus Bosch but what kind of hell was there at this time
| a wet pit the murderers' alley the barrack called a palace of
| justice a home-brewed Mephisto in a Lenin jacket sent Aurora's
| grandchildren out into the field boys with potato faces very ugly
| girls with red hands
|
| Verily their rhetoric was made of cheap sacking (Marcus Tullius
| kept turning in his grave) chains of tautologies a couple of
| concepts like flails the dialectics of slaughterers no
| distinctions in reasoning syntax deprived of the beauty of the
| subjunctive
|
| So aesthetics can be helpful in life one should not neglect the
| study of beauty
|
| Before we declare our consent we must carefully examine the shape
| of the architecture the rhythm of the drums and pipes official
| colours the despicable ritual of funerals
|
| Our eyes and ears refused obedience the princes of our senses
| proudly chose exile
|
| It did not require great character at all we had a shred of
| necessary courage but fundamentally it was a matter of taste Yes
| taste that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a
| sneer even if for this the precious capital of the body the head
| must fall
| brador wrote:
| Don't need taste when you've got the market homie.
|
| Great artists ship.
| yenepho wrote:
| Is the post-mortem written to sound like AI slop, or is it just
| that? Offending either way :P
| neuroticnews25 wrote:
| Unconscious intuition you can't explain in words, thus can't
| reason about, as the main guiding principle in the ever more
| cognitively demanding world, yeah, good luck.
| joyheron42 wrote:
| > I do write like this sometimes. The short sentences, the
| reversals, the one-word lines--all of it. It's just the way it
| is. A LLM writes that way too, because it was trained on the same
| essays I grew up reading
|
| I'm extremely irritated that the post is being accused of being
| AI slop. I have a visceral reaction to AI generated writing, and
| this post rang 100% human to me.
|
| Makes me actually quite angry that one can no longer use short,
| pithy sentences without being accused of using AI. If AI causes
| everyone to reject actual decent writing because someone can't
| distinguish between it and that from a human, we have other
| problems on our hand.
|
| The content of the post resonated with me 100% as well.
| kuschku wrote:
| Same, the post has an entirely different speech rhythm than AI.
|
| In Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" he describes how,
| when cutting a movie, the reason cuts work at all is because
| human experience has cuts: we blink.
|
| More specifically, we blink when a thought is complete, to
| finish one thought and begin another.
|
| When a movie is well-edited, the audience will adapt to the
| rhythm of the movie, and you know you've placed a cut at the
| right moment when the audience will blink at the exact moment
| of the cut.
|
| The same "rhythm of thought" applies to written essays as well,
| and once you get a feeling for it, you'll notice how AI
| generated text follows no such rhythm, no such structure.
|
| AI generated text has the rhythm of TV salespeople combined
| with tiktok brainrot, overwhelming you while at the same time
| saying nothing at all.
| Vasserot wrote:
| << Software works the same way. >> No, I don't think so. Modern
| software has been around for about 50 years, the Internet & OOP
| for about 35 years. People have been cooking steaks since
| antiquity!
|
| If your opinion or understanding of how a program works or how it
| should work is your main asset for keeping your job, then I think
| you're the one who's going to get cooked. You'd have to be rather
| disillusioned to wake up in the post-COVID era, with technology
| that triples its algorithmic efficiency every year, and conclude
| that a dehumanizing industry will still need our expertise in the
| future.
|
| The key words here are "dehumanizing industry". You can always
| bake your bread the old-fashioned way or cook your steak in <<
| your own small restaurant >>, no one will stop you. But small
| restaurants, at least where I live, aren't doing very well.
| abrbhat wrote:
| Taste seems something that should be more related to a craft but
| when doing engineering we don't talk about taste, we talk about
| theory, systems, practices, skill, intuition, experimentation,
| teaching and learning. So the debate on whether taste matters or
| not might come down to whether creating software can be called
| craft or engineering. In my opinion, maybe programming was more
| of a craft before LLMs but it looks like it is being squished
| between the engineering aspects of producing and maintaining
| software going ahead.
| abrbhat wrote:
| On a side note, since the author has included a detailed
| explanation that the text is not AI generated and this is her
| default writing style, I just find it very difficult to read this
| style of extra punchy writing. I don't know if it is just me or
| anyone else as well.
| pascahousut wrote:
| I assume it's common and understandable to dislike LLM
| generated content and therefore anything that resembles it
| regardless of origin. For those who happen to write in a
| similar way it's a pity.
|
| I've noticed some people on the internet dismiss content just
| by its length too now. I assume this is because they're not
| used to the idea of a human producing long form content (as
| opposed to the short form rewarded by popular feeds). I wrote a
| post (other forum, other handle) where I included some markdown
| tables and detailed explanations in an attempt to be thorough
| and help others answer my question and got accused of having
| LLM generated it despite writing it myself. Maybe the usage of
| markdown tables or the length of the post was the issue.
| Anyway, it's not nice being dismissed as AI slop when no AI was
| involved. I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable
| way of identifying origin of digital content such as text on a
| forum.
| ben_w wrote:
| > I also don't see how there could ever be a reliable way of
| identifying origin of digital content such as text on a
| forum.
|
| Perfectly reliable, no.
|
| But:
|
| 1. these models aren't even trying to hide their nature, if
| anything the opposite
|
| 2. a great many users of those models are (lazy or time
| constrained, doesn't matter which) or lacking in style of
| their own, and in each of these cases the result is they
| don't prompt the models to hide their default style; worse,
| the outputs keeps getting RLHF-ed so despite how much of an
| "ugh" factor it has to the reader, most people making these
| things, to the extent that they do review the content at all
| rather than blindly uploading, actually like the style
|
| 3. Models don't share state between users. This means the
| model won't act "bored" from having already written the same
| thing before, so when 5000 people all prompt for "blog post
| about X", then it will create 5000 blog posts with almost
| identical in writing style. In turn, this means that the
| style of the most-used model (I assume for English-language
| blog posts this is still ChatGPT) has become cliche faster
| and harder than almost anything else.
| account42 wrote:
| I don't agree with the premise that creating is no longer the
| hard thing. It's only been automated when your taste is bad.
| nazgu1 wrote:
| I have mixed feelings... I stumbled upon, read a post-mortem that
| looks even more AI-generated than the article.
|
| "That says something about my writing. It says nothing about who
| wrote it." - Two contradicting sentences, author's writing skills
| are part of the author as-a-whole
|
| "The short sentences, the reversals, the one-word lines" and then
| "I will write the next one plainer.". - even more?
|
| And... I wonder if this is like some agent wrote article, and, in
| the loop, added port-mortem, after visiting hacker-news comments
| and manipulate that this is human written. Or maybe author is
| just trolling us with AI-like prose...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Had the same taste response, checked and Pangram also says AI.
| They have very low false positive rate.
| scandox wrote:
| > I'm sincerely sorry for publishing something that has allowed
| you to feel this way.
|
| What fresh hell is this? If this is human then I wish it was AI
| hypfer wrote:
| > and this post will go down as my not-the-proudest, however,
| I take your criticism to heart--although not personally--and
| strive to improve.
|
| I just do not understand why people - even when actively
| denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash.
|
| I don't care if it is the "right" thing to use there. The
| character has been associated with slop. Why do you keep
| using it without even just acknowledging that you did.
|
| Just use any other character - like I am doing right now.
|
| It must be AI indeed. Humans cannot be this dense.
|
| ___
|
| Oh god I just saw the annotations on the side
|
| > A fair pushback I got:
|
| Dude. Why. Oh god. Why do you talk like claude. I want to
| believe you. I really do, but hell. Even claude could likely
| tell you that you sound like claude.
|
| Oh my god.
| vsl wrote:
| > I just do not understand why people - even when actively
| denying LLM usage - use the fucking em dash.
|
| Because they are literate? Unlike the "em-dash means AI"
| illiterate crowd?
|
| I'm not going to change my writing because some idiots who
| never read a novel or heard about typography think only AI
| does that.
| hypfer wrote:
| I just do not comprehend how that can be the hill people
| choose to die on.
|
| Like.. I get it. It's wrong. It feels wrong to give the
| AI nonsense just an inch and all.
|
| But in the grand scheme of things, it's just highly
| ineffective dogmatism that makes people unheard,
| miserable and just further increases struggle.
|
| Which people are free to do, in the same way that I am
| free to purposefully drop a massive hammer on my foot
| just to make some kind of statement. Hurts me a lot, rest
| of the world stays entirely indifferent.
| tripzilch wrote:
| Avoiding em-dashes is not going to save you from being
| blind-sided by slop.
| yoz-y wrote:
| If you stop doing something right, because of fear, then
| the terrorists win.
| hypfer wrote:
| I can see why you're saying that but
|
| a) Using some other horizontal line is not in the class
| of "wrong" that would warrant this sort of reaction.
| You're debating the pixel count. Not the object. The
| aspect ratio of it.
|
| b) If you're acting out of fear that's dumb, yes. If you
| however simply pick your battles for efficiency, that's
| not "the terrorists win". That's "you win" instead of
| "you loose due to attrition".
|
| __
|
| I've also consulted with the LLM regarding the "class of
| wrong" thing, because I thought it might be not quite
| clear.
|
| So what I meant by that is that it's not giving up actual
| words or dumbing down your sentences. Just swapping out a
| character that is practically indistiguishable for the
| untrained eye.
|
| Hell, whole classes of social engineering attacks rely on
| that very property.
|
| I know I know. "Wehret den Anfangen". Slippery slope.
|
| But those are insane as a default reaction to everything.
|
| ___
|
| I get it. SV sucks. HN sucks. The world sucks. Can't let
| it also take this little thing. If it can take all the
| big things, then at least it won't take this tiny tidbit.
|
| Emotionally, I get it.
|
| But that's not how you make rational decisions. Nor is it
| how we would win.
| grey-area wrote:
| Typography is not related to literacy. If you're going to
| insist on em-dashes at least choose the right word.
| jkahrs595 wrote:
| Th emdash is not something I use ever (before or after AI
| slop), but telling people not to use it because it's
| associated with slop is not the way.
|
| It's like when people tried to tell everyone to stop using
| the ok symbol with their hands because a small group of
| hateful fucks pretended it meant something else. It only
| switches meaning if you let it, and stop using it yourself.
|
| What happens when AI adopts something else? Do we give that
| up too?
|
| With all of that said, this guy is definitely AI lol. He's
| gotta be trolling us by doubling down.
| hypfer wrote:
| I mean you would stop using the OK Hands thing when
| trying to communicate with a group that has for (possibly
| arbitrary) reasons decided that that symbol is bad, and
| thus anything you say is bad, right?
|
| At least temporarily until you got synced up with that
| group?
|
| There is a place for the strategy of just continuing to
| use something and push through the noise there, but the
| em dash is not in that place. Common perception of it has
| too much momentum you cannot overcome like that, which -
| at the time of writing - makes it a bad choice.
|
| How it will look like in 12 months we shall see, but
| today, I would advise against using it (without
| acknowledgement) in texts that talk about AI.
| jkahrs595 wrote:
| No, that's my whole point. I would not stop. If someone
| tries to attribute malice to something I do that has
| none, I might explain to them how misguided they are, but
| I'm not going to give in just because someone can't be
| bothered to understand context.
|
| I think it's fine to use as one of many signals to
| identify AI (not the only) but, again, avoiding its use
| is not going to solve anything.
| tripzilch wrote:
| I'm being serious here: Looking for em-dashes is a terrible
| way to "scan" for slop. You need to look deeper than that
| and if you did, there's clearly a voice there. If you let
| yourself develop an "em-dash allergy" and think this helps
| you avoid LLM-slop, you're scanning for the wrong things
| and it's going to do the opposite for you. Actually stay on
| your toes and don't become this complacent.
| jottinger wrote:
| _sigh_ The em-dash is something we 've read a lot from GOOD
| PUBLISHED WRITING so we as human authors tend to emulate
| what we read as good writing. It's a publishing artifact
| that's migrated. It's not a sign of the apocalypse. Neither
| is AI, but hey.
| yreg wrote:
| I will continue to use em dashes as I always had, thank you
| very much.
|
| I couldn't care less if you mistake me for an LLM. That's
| your problem for being overconfident in your misplaced
| judgement.
| notashelf wrote:
| Em dashes are mine. I will use them whether they have been
| appropriated by LLMs or not. I used to use commas in their
| place. That resulted in a much more dense post layout and
| far less readable text.
|
| FWIW I actually use three dashes (-) and my blog's build
| system transforms those into em dashes. This is not a
| defense, but nor is "this character is associated with
| slop" an argument. Yes LLMs use lots of words, phrases and
| patterns. Would you rather I stop using altogether? I am
| all for criticism, but please pick something I can actually
| change and improve without cutting a part of my style for
| no reason other than "Claude uses it too!"
| hypfer wrote:
| > This is not a defense, but nor is "this character is
| associated with slop" an argument.
|
| You're misunderstanding me. It's not an argument. I have
| no strong opinions about it.
|
| I am telling you how people perceive it. You can (and
| should!) use that information however you like, but don't
| mistake this as some sort of opinion thing.
|
| I've observed the world. I believe it operates like this.
| Feel free to discard if you have data that suggests it
| operates otherwise.
|
| __
|
| Don't mistake my delivery of that for personal outrage
| about you or that unicode character.
|
| I just get very annoyed when I see systems not working
| optimally with failure modes that to me seem.. dumb.
|
| If you allow me to quote the LLM:
|
| > He isn't trying to police notashelf's writing. He
| doesn't care about notashelf's writing! He is just a guy
| who noticed a pothole in the road, pointed it out, and is
| now watching in pure fascination as people fiercely
| defend their God-given right to drive their cars straight
| into it.
|
| Thanks, gemini.
| notashelf wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying :)
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > something that has allowed you to feel this way
|
| Sorry buddy, next time I won't ask for permission. I don't
| care what you allow.
| Madmallard wrote:
| Engagement farming has found its way to Hacker News.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| I'm a writer with what may be an unpopular opinion. I have a
| college degree in creative writing; I do technical writing and
| programming for a living, and I used to publish technical
| articles on Linux, Python, Elixir, and other topics--complete
| with em dashes--long before AI was a thing.
|
| When confronting AI as a writer and deciding how I feel about
| it, I've landed on the conclusion that I've never accused
| mathematicians of churning out "calculator slop." A calculator
| is just a tool to make the complex work of mathematics easier.
| I now view AI as a calculator for writing, among other things.
| If the idea is good and the information is sound, I don't let
| the occasional awkward phrasing bother me. The truth is, most
| people can't write very well anyway, so if AI helps them
| communicate better--even if it is obviously generated by AI--
| more power to them.
| owebmaster wrote:
| People that don't communicate well can't fix that with AI.
| Turning one line of confusing thoughts into a 30 lines text
| make it worse, not better.
| pmg101 wrote:
| Somebody at $formerwork wrote a "skill" that takes a
| poorly/briefly specified Jira ticket, and "fleshes it out",
| purportedly so that when an agent picks up the ticket it
| has more context.
|
| Really at that point, with head in hands, rather than try
| to explain the foolishness, I decided I was better out.
|
| "Zoom and enhance" used to be a joke/meme, apparently it's
| now "engineering".
| ferfumarma wrote:
| And mathematicians who don't understand mathematical theory
| can't use calculators to write proofs.
|
| Focus on the content and the idea; not how it was written.
| owebmaster wrote:
| One line of idea spread into 30 is the worse way to
| convene an idea. Only people terrible at writing think
| using AI for prose is good. Most of the times, they also
| hate reading it, but love asking people to read their AI
| slop.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Except calculators provide verifiably good results. AI slop
| sucks up and wastes _everyone 's_ time with nothing
| verifiably worthwhile.
| __alias wrote:
| There's a bit of a difference to me between a calculator and
| writing.. Creativity. Words aren't just a vessel for ideas.
| If there were different calculation structures etc and space
| for people to develop their own styles and approaches to
| calculate things, then sure.
|
| A person's writing style is developed through what they read.
| And if human's writing style becomes more homogeneous through
| AI then that's sort of a shame.
| t0duf0du wrote:
| Hello friend, do we anything subjective from a calculator?
|
| [edit]:
|
| Someone already pointed this out.
| drngdds wrote:
| My points of disagreement are
|
| - At least to me, AI writing (especially from Claude) is
| actively painful to read. It's worse than the average person
| who has flawed English (or just sucks at writing) because of
| how verbose and stylistically repetitive it is.
|
| - AI writing is a strong probabilistic signal that what I'm
| reading is going to be crap in terms of the actual ideas and
| content too, even if it isn't the case 100% of the time. I
| just don't want to waste my time on that kind of thing.
| base698 wrote:
| When I use it for writing I usually have an idea or thesis
| to explore already. I typically write it out stream of
| consciousness. The core idea is mine.
|
| I'm not using LLMs to think for me, instead just edit the
| writing so it has proper grammar and the run ons are
| reduced.
|
| Even better for something that has data. You can pull PDFs
| with encoded tables and extract the data into consistent
| units to compare. You can have it write code to do it and
| cross check the outputs. You can do that in a minute. Would
| take hours without an LLM.
| basilikum wrote:
| Calculating is not math. Calculators make mathematicians
| better mathematicians by allowing them to spend their time on
| actual mathematics.
|
| Writing is thinking. LLM writing makes authors worsr authors
| and even dumber people overall.
|
| Also a calculator gives the same answer as a human (except
| for human errors where the calculator isa strict
| improvement). LLMs absolutely do not give the same output as
| humans.
| darkwater wrote:
| I really don't know, their GH profile [1] and their projects,
| even the recent ones [2], seem pretty non-LLM. IMO the post-
| mortem is more a satirical response to the HN criticism,
| doubling down on the "AI slop" writing style.
|
| [1] https://github.com/NotAShelf [2]
| https://github.com/NotAShelf/tuigreet
| attheballot wrote:
| > IMO the post-mortem is more a satirical response to the HN
| criticism
|
| They have edited it again to be slightly more emotional. It's
| why their "On Taste" closure doesn't actually pertain to
| Taste anymore. Of course, they wouldn't notice the mismatch -
| they didn't write it in the first place.
|
| They aren't being satirical. They're pissed they got called
| them out. Were they not, they'd not bother with edits.
| darkwater wrote:
| Ok but who's pissed off bere? A human or a let-loose agent?
| Or a human that wrote the post with an LLM although they
| swear they didn't?
| notashelf wrote:
| It's neither satirical, nor by an agent on the loose/in a
| loop. I read the comment section with good intentions,
| assuming good faith---and in their defense there is
| plenty---but the amount of misattribution is
| counterproductive. Nothing about the post-mortem section
| is "pissed off". I wrote it in complete serenity, like I
| am writing this comment to explain. There are three
| groups of commenters:
|
| 1. Skeptic, but engaging in good faith - thank you, much
| appreciated
|
| 2. Skeptic, not truly engaging with the post - that's
| fine, can't win 'em all
|
| 3. Completely disengaged with anything in writing.
| They're under the impression that I am criticizing their
| taste, and felt the need to "strike back" - what?
|
| The post-mortem is a response to all three groups. I've
| explained the situation, apologized for what I agree I
| did wrong, and clarified my boundary. It's not worth
| pointing time and time again it was not LLM authored, and
| I do not have anything to add.
| darkwater wrote:
| Fine for me, I didn't ask any justification from you, but
| the post-mortem does/did sound as LLM-speech, and
| presuming it human I also presumed some kind of humor in
| it (I was probably projecting).
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Yeah, I am suprised this article ranks so high. It's either
| written by AI or it's poorly written. Very little to show on
| behalf of "taste".
|
| "Taste" is one of these words that have been bandied about
| recently, in addition to "moat". I've never seen a productive
| conversation stem from either of those mentiosn.
| noosphr wrote:
| People read the title not the article.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| yes this is 100% AI, the article and the 'post mortem'. People
| are so gullible. Anyone who has read a lot of AI can spot it
| instantly, but Pangram also says 99% of this is AI. So many
| signs, and no there were no human authors who wrote like this
|
| "What it actually is"
|
| "Here is the uncomfortable mechanism"
|
| "Let me be plain about it"
|
| "The floor"
|
| "Everything downstream of the verdict"
|
| I'll eat my hat if this isn't AI.
|
| Very similar style to my AI 'utopia'
| https://aiking.dwyer.co.za/utopia
|
| I don't even think all AI writing is bad, but lying about it
| definitely is.
| Good4boothee wrote:
| Please, I couldn't care what Pangram (or any other
| "detector") says. If it feels like AI, does it even matter if
| LLM was co-author? It lands in the same "bad writing, I won't
| continue to read that" category.
|
| That said I am recently getting paranoid about YT videos, I
| hear Claude traces in every 5th script. If people are going
| to spend substantial time recording and editing, is it worth
| "saving" time on most important part?
| dizhn wrote:
| "it's not just ...., it's ..." is in EVERY youtube video I
| watch. There's got to be a reason AI uses it so much. Maybe
| it was already prevalent in bad scripts and we never
| noticed it before. Sort of like the "Webster dictionary
| defines ... as " cliche.
| basilikum wrote:
| An antithesis is a completely valid stylistic device.
| It's just very easy to overuse or to use as a cliche when
| you're not using language as a tool for a specific
| purpose, but just want to sound smart or think "fancy
| stylistic devices = good writing".
| visarga wrote:
| my idea is "skin is all that's left"
| dwedge wrote:
| > Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused
| to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it
| would kill it.
|
| Just reading the title and I was already thinking about that
| book. It's a great book though it gets progressively more
| difficult
| kcexn wrote:
| I think whether "taste" was ever important comes down to whether
| software is a commodity to be bought and sold, or something more
| strategic.
|
| The company that needs a webapp because everyone else has one is
| never going to value "taste".
|
| To adapt to this AI world, we need to either ship more lower-
| quality software, or start seeking out higher value problems. I
| don't see any other way around it.
| QwenGlazer9000 wrote:
| I'm worried about taste because to me it seems like something
| like taste would be the best thing for a ML model.
| parasubvert wrote:
| That's interesting. I would (and I think most?) would say the
| opposite. Good taste is hard to define because it is very
| contextual. There's popular taste but also there's
| artisanal/specialized knowledge taste. One potentially leads to
| mass adoption, the other leads to higher value for a few
| people.
| the_wolo wrote:
| I really don't get why people here are so obsessed with "taste".
| I also find the premise of the article to be completely wrong.
| Taste, not only in software, is only the only thing that's left
| for humans, if you ignore the complex social environments in
| which our technological systems are embedded. AI puts the
| emphasis in the socio-technological system on the _social_. If
| you were never social to begin with, or if you deliberately
| ignore the social embeddedness of our systems b /c you are
| terminally valley pilled, you might come under the impression
| though that indeed, taste is the only thing that's left.
| Hoffesnthal wrote:
| How is this at the top of HN...
| cccchara wrote:
| Is taste really the one thing LLMs can't take away or do we talk
| about taste because judging has become the cheapest move
| available? I think focusing too much on taste is how we lose
| focus on the two questions that actually matter: what do I
| actually care about, and why do I make things at all.
| sdellis wrote:
| You cannot separate "taste" from the question of "why do I make
| things at all?" because they are inextricably bound. The reason
| for your making something is where taste is expressed.
| burnto wrote:
| > Everyone can make anything. Almost no one can tell you what is
| worth making. That was always the harder skill. It is now the
| only one left.
|
| But people can and do tell you what is worth making. Taste is
| largely set by class and power. The "skill" is having the right
| context (wealth, education, network) and then pattern matching on
| it.
| Ac1285asFa wrote:
| "Taste" and "personalization" are this month's AI talking points.
| luckystarr wrote:
| Taste is something you use to build the guardrails of AI over
| time and many paper cuts endured. Once you have a big enough set
| of these (call them rules) recorded, they become your development
| substrate. You narrow the paths the agents can take to arrive at
| a coherent system. If you don't do that, superficially it may
| look similar, but it's not and users will be able to tell.
| gregwebs wrote:
| Taste ends up providing tangible value.
|
| If you have taste in writing code, you spend less time on bugs
| and can implment features more quickly. This is still true with
| LLMs if you learn how to direct them instead of having them
| direct you.
|
| Someone else without taste can re-implement what you have done
| with AI. But it will take them more effort, more time, and more
| money.
|
| But that's always been the value in writing code. Any MBA can end
| up producing software to accomplish something by hiring other
| people. But their company might not get off the ground because of
| the expense of not having technical competency (or engineers with
| taste) at their core.
| stiiv wrote:
| LLM-based code generation requires disciplined operation to lead
| to the best outcomes. Shops who only ever had taste as a proxy
| for discipline were missing this before, and they're missing it
| now. The fact that it's missing is why so many organizations are
| tolerating ever-growing mountains of slop. (Not new, by the way;
| just dramatically accelerated.)
|
| Discipline can be linked to system design standards and your
| review process, and it can be translated to measurable outcomes
| at scale and over time, regardless of how agents are involved:
| unplanned work, time to recovery, employee retention, etc. When
| outcomes like these become your priority, you see that you can't
| rely on taste alone.
| cribbles wrote:
| For those keeping track, this is now (at least) the third wholly
| or partially AI-generated article on the theme of "taste" as
| enduring source of human comparative advantage to hit the HN
| front page.
|
| Previously:
|
| Taste in the age of AI and LLMs -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47677241
|
| You Had No Taste Before AI -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288551
| tfrancisl wrote:
| This article is not AI generated. Everyone is asserting it is
| but the author is well known as a critic of these tools in his
| communities. Why would he lie and use it to write an article
| with his genuine views, edit it to assuage the feelings of HN
| commenters, and then double down? Speedrunning losing his
| credibility, or, his writing style got on some people's nerves?
| lolpython wrote:
| The author has updated the bottom of the post to clarify that
| it was not AI-generated. https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-
| all-thats-left#post-mor...
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| Pangram says "100% AI-generated". I trust Pangram more than I
| trust this author's word.
| pilingual wrote:
| Paul Graham mentioned Pangram the other day.
|
| I went to the site and pasted something into the text box.
| The next step was to sign up.
|
| I don't trust Pangram.
| serhalp wrote:
| Well, that is a shame, in my opinion. I trust humans
| significantly more, and I hope that never changes.
| lolpython wrote:
| That's idiotic, frankly.
| alansaber wrote:
| I get the market need for AI detection, but the
| fundamentals of it are so woo-woo that I despair
| kif wrote:
| Here's another AI detector I just built:
| text.indexOf("--") > -1
| lackoftactics wrote:
| I showed some old Olga Tokarczuk essays to my friends to pick
| what was ai slop and what was not as experiment, pre- 2020 ones
| from Czuly Narrator to be exact. Guess what, they picked the ai
| one as human and her as most ai. Maybe because she uses a lot
| of big words and em dashes.
|
| We are at the point, when there is too much cognitive energy
| needed to discern writing from human, human ai assisted and all
| ai. Should we know make mistakes on purpose to avoid being
| labelled as ai slop? :)
| jimmydoe wrote:
| AI community's obsession with the word taste has become
| somewhat distasteful for me.
|
| Isn't aesthetic a better word for this?
| noahmichael89 wrote:
| Taste is the ability to perceieve an aesthetic.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| If I ran a dev team, I'd spend a day a week on deliberately hand
| coding. Even if the clankers write most of the code, IMO we need
| deliberate practice to develop taste. There's a side of taste
| that's Rick Rubin, how the customer experiences something.
| There's also what a classically trained cellist hears in a more
| tactile, layered sense in how another cellist plays a piece.
| arionhardison wrote:
| I won't try to posit whether this post was AI-generated or not
| and I do not think it matters. That focus is a defense mechanism
| for handling an uncomfortable idea.
|
| The idea is this: the commodification of intelligence requires
| the codification of domain expertise to function reliably, and
| proper governance to scale.
|
| Taste, in my opinion, is a fill-in for absent function and lack
| of utility. Systems function; they don't require taste. Taste is
| why PG put Sam Altman where he did -- not a system of merit, not
| evidence. Taste is why DJT can do no wrong in the eyes of his
| base. It is unprovable and has no true measure, and that is
| exactly why it gets leaned on so heavily: it lets you claim
| superiority no matter what slop your system produces.
|
| You say the box moved taste up a level. Out of the making and
| into decision layer. That relocation is a smell. Your
| unfalsifiable thing conveniently gets moved to the one place it
| still can't be checked, at precisely the moment the making became
| checkable. Just like: Iran/Strait of Hormus, AI curing diseases
| and all of the other bold promises made by people who claim to be
| "taste makers" but in the end its all the same. Bullshit! Because
| thats what taste is a euphemism for in this context. Convincing
| others that you are correct in some way with no actual proof to
| back it up.
|
| The vector here should not be "taste"; it's tolerances: written
| down, measured, enforced. The judgment gets encoded into a spec,
| and the spec is what survives the person who had it. That is
| codification; not "taste".
| pngwen wrote:
| This brilliantly articulates what is required for best practices
| in the AI era. I am putting this article on my required reading
| list for Software Engineering. On behalf of my students, thank
| you for writing this!
| parasubvert wrote:
| Ironically, this essay is an example of at least somewhat
| "questionable taste". It has provoked dialogue and thus is
| valuable, but I think it makes a number of cognitive errors in
| its argument.
|
| "Taste" is just knowledge. Advanced knowledge. Knowledge that is
| not easily put into words.
|
| This is another restatement that knowledge, in a human head, is
| the determining factor of production, over land, labor and
| capital. This a post-capitalist argument that's been made for
| over 30 years (Peter Drucker in his 1993 book is my favorite),
| and it's been at least somewhat true even back to the 70s, just
| increasingly so as AI takes off.
|
| The author's sidebar of AI or even cloud computing "taking
| ownership of the means of production away from workers" is
| entirely misunderstanding how the modern economy operates and
| shows how badly we need a new Marx (and Keynes, Schumpeter, or
| Drucker) since his analysis doesn't seem to provide the same
| analytical value in late capitalism. Renting vs. owning the means
| of production is now entirely a function of knowledge of the
| entrepreneurs (and their team).
|
| Capital is ubiquitous now and is desperate for return - it
| remains powerful but is not all-powerful. We've had years of
| near-low interest rates and even after COVID inflation, they're
| still historically low. It is far more accessible to
| entrepreneurs than it has ever been in history, between grants,
| loans, subsidies, private equity, angels, crowdfunding,
| donations, etc. It's practically a cliche that billions in
| capital can be wasted on an initiative because the people
| involved had no idea what they were doing. I don't think AI
| changes that.
|
| We don't need to rent our tokens, we can run open models on our
| local rigs (which still requires capital). We don't need to rent
| our servers, we can buy, rack and stack them on our own. Which we
| choose is fentirely dependent on the knowledge we have. If we
| don't know how to run an AI rig, we _must_ rent it. If we don 't
| know how to run a server, we _must_ rent it. etc.
|
| There are several walls driven by taste - Design - Testing -
| Production - Security - Scalability
|
| In particular, the author seems confused on what "production" is.
| Production is still the wall. There was a joke on X the other
| day:
|
| "I vibe coded my dream app! Try it out here:
| http://localhost:8080/coolapp"
|
| Software running in production is not tokens. I'm sure properly
| prompted AI can deploy and run simple software in production but
| this requires a lot of knowledge to prompt to constrain it to run
| in a secure, scalable, adaptable way as complexity, scale, and
| capability grows.
| xnx wrote:
| "De gustibus non est disputandum" ("In matters of taste, there
| can be no disputes")
|
| One thing I'm excited for is the expanded ability to modify and
| create my own interfaces and software so I don't have to be
| subjected to the bad taste of others. An example of this is
| something like Chrome reading mode that removes all the stupid
| decoration from what I'm trying to read.
| rubenflamshep wrote:
| My workflow has become a sort of "living process". When I
| encounter friction in some part of it, I focus my attention on
| it, it adapts, grows from from an annoyance to something that I
| delight in when using.
|
| Some small examples: Google Chrome doesn't have default
| shortcuts for accessing bookmarks so I made an extension for
| myself that does this. I have a SketchyBar setup that I'm
| constantly updating. Recently added my CC/Codex plan usage to
| it so I'm no longer constantly running /status in the different
| CLIs. Etc, etc.
| hashmap wrote:
| If taste that's all that's left you've kinda really got nothing.
| Taste is an anti-moat, it's sort of a measure of how well you, as
| a literal receptor, agree with a pile of people out there on
| something. Like sure its something you can sort of develop but it
| costs you nothing to use, and if you're not creating something
| off-manifold you're just smearing stuff around that's already on
| it. Horrendous kind of take on "taste" that's taken hold of
| everyone. Kinda like if a music artist stopped making music to
| make spotify playlists. Sure they could maybe make _good_
| playlists, but if they are sitting there crowing "taste is all
| thats left!" it's.. what is that? It just sounds like either a
| deluded giving up or just a very direct admission of giving up.
| adelks wrote:
| Very nice article. I agree with it, call it taste, call it
| judgment, call it quality, I want things done the way I see as
| satisfactory, and it requires me to make LLMs do things
| differently several times. Like exploring a tree with a heuristic
| they don't have and need to rely on us humans to give.
| hnx0rqy49u wrote:
| Okay that's a clever way to put it
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