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

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

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

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

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

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."