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Taste in the age of AI and LLMs
- dk970 7mo ago[flagged]
- dk970 7mo ago[flagged]
- furyofantares 7mo agoExtremely ironic piece of slop.
- echelon 7mo agoNo - at face value, our work has diminished value. The entire supply and demand economics of our careers is changing in the blink of an eye. There are people trying to figure out what this means and where to create value. "Taste is the only moat" is one such hypothesis. "Senior engineers will be fine" is another. Everything is super frothy right now and we're in for a wild 2026.
- dinkleberg 7mo agoYeah I feel like we’re getting pranked here
- twoodfin 7mo agoIndeed, no taste.
- scared_together 7mo agoIt’s also possible this is the first iteration of the loop described in the “A practical loop for training taste” section. Which would be less of a “prank” and more of “using the HN audience to feed the machine”. The loop (some points snipped for brevity): > 1. Pick one high-leverage artifact from your week. A paragraph… > 2. Generate 10 to 20 versions with an AI model. > 3. For each version, write one sentence that starts with "fails because..." > 4. Rewrite the strongest version with a hard constraint… > 5. Ship the final version somewhere real and observe what happens.
- _dwt 7mo agoIt's getting bad here; I've seen at least three obviously AI-written "anti-AI" or "AI critical" pieces hit and remain on the front page in the last week. I can't help but think about Bill Hicks on marketing: "Everyone here who’s in marketing is now thinkin' the same thing: 'Oh, cool. Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market.'"
- elcapitan 7mo agoThe rest of that is also still gold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
- scared_together 7mo agoI agree. For those who didn’t read the article… There are subheadings every 3 paragraphs and enough bullets to reload a machine gun. There are also neither any sources nor any personal anecdotes. Everything feels generic. > Over time, this changes how you work. You stop admiring polish for its own sake. You get faster at spotting empty specificity, borrowed tone, and fake confidence. “Empty specificity, borrowed tone and fake confidence” describe the article itself.
- gmaster1440 7mo agoIf you're properly bitter-lesson-pilled then why wouldn't better models continue to develop and improve taste and discernment when it comes to design, development, and just better thinking overall?
- sparker72678 7mo agoAt least in part because some of Taste is fashion.
- charcircuit 7mo agoIsn't part of fashion trends? AI is good at recognizing trends.
- ux266478 7mo agoNot in the sense you mean. These are trends with concrete origins, not a root of statistical aggregate. They only look that way if you aren't into fashion and don't follow the handful of fashion houses that decide essentially everything.
- wavemode 7mo agoI think that would imply the creation of AGI (i.e. something as intelligent or more intelligent than mankind), which many consider to be science fiction at this point. > bitter-lesson-pilled The "bitter lesson" doesn't imply that AGI is coming, all it says is that letting AIs learn on their own yields better results than directly teaching them things.
- pa7ch 7mo agoI think the author addresses this in saying that since AI output is statistically plausible by design its unlikely to improve in this area. Why do you think AI will get better in this way?
- relativeadv 7mo agomost (all?) models are fundamentally a regression toward the mean. Good taste is rarely, if ever, residing in the mean.
- allears 7mo agoAnd if anybody knows about good taste, it's techies, right?
- echelon 7mo agoSome of the worst taste and worst opinions. Lots of techies hate things that are popular with the rest of humanity. You see lots of nagging, complaining, and disconnected from reality takes. Hate for Instagram, "Dropbox will never work", "pop culture sucks", etc. I'll make a mean joke: a lot of y'all better learn a trade. Plumbing, perhaps. I kid, of course, but I also wonder if it might turn out to be the eventual reality.
- Hasslequest 7mo ago[dead]
- ibero 7mo agohttps://x.com/netcapgirl/status/2024140332963705342?s=46 https://x.com/netcapgirl/status/2024140332963705342?s=46 evergreen.
- Hasslequest 7mo ago[dead]
- nwsm 7mo agousually when you call something "evergreen" it's not 2 months old
- Hasslequest 7mo ago[dead]
- abkolan 7mo agoI think it's just an internet trope at this moment.
- abkolan 7mo agoWhat's evergreen about it?
- all2 7mo agoIt's an Americanism that means 'it's always green' or 'always relevant'.
- eru 7mo agoIs the joke that the guy is drinking bad coffee?
- TheGRS 7mo agoThe joke is that all of the engineers that came before AI were also just following established patterns, right down to everyone wearing the same outfit to work despite our tech workplaces usually being very business casual. Implication that taste was not something these engineers had either.
- CharlieDigital 7mo ago> One of the most useful things about AI is also one of the most humbling: it reveals how clear your own judgment actually is. If your critique stays vague, your taste is still underdeveloped. If your critique becomes precise, your judgment is stronger than the model output. You can then use the model well instead of being led by it. Something I find that teams get wrong with agentic coding: they start by reverse engineering docs from an existing codebase. This is a mistake. Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated. This exercise is hard for some folks to grasp because they've never thought much about what well-constructed code or architectures looks like; they have no "taste" and thus no ability to precisely dictate the framework for "perfect" (yes, there is some subjectivity that reflects taste).
- sodapopcan 7mo ago> Instead, the right train of thought is: "what would perfect code look like?" and then meticulously describe to the LLM what "perfect" is to shape every line that gets generated. I think this goes against what a lot of developers want AI to be (not me, to be clear).
- CharlieDigital 7mo agoI'm looking at it from a team perspective. With the right docs, I can lift every developer of every skill level up to a minimum "floor" and influence every line of code that gets committed to move it closer to "perfect". I'm not writing every prompt so there is still some variation, but this approach has given us very high quality PRs with very minimal overhead by getting the initial generation passes as close to "perfect" as reasonably possible.
- sodapopcan 7mo agoOh I agree with you, I'm just saying a lot of developers don't want to use it like that. AI has liberated them from the drudgery of reading and writing code and they won't accept that they should still be doing a bit of both, if not a lot of reading.
- _2fnr 7mo ago[flagged]
- ata_aman 7mo agoI maintain the opinion that courage is the only moat and always will be
- jrm4 7mo agoCourage with consequences, yes.
- DrewADesign 7mo agoIt’s not that straightforward. Art directors and designers get paid to visually communicate things the business wants to communicate— anything from brand vibes, to directing people to click on a “buy me” button, to the state of an interface. Most designers in tech companies aren’t even the ones that design things like branding — that’s done by specialists in extremely well-compensated studios, and corporate designers are stuck following their guidelines. Taste is nearly irrelevant to an interface designer, for example.
- _2fnr 7mo ago[flagged]
- ux266478 7mo agoThe job isn't about visual judgement, but composition. Judgement/taste is the responsibility of directors and executives.
- DrewADesign 7mo agoDon’t feel bad — most people honestly have no idea what designers really do, and I think developers’ proximity to them instills false confidence in their understanding of it. (I worked in both fields for years, and am also a graphic artist.) A great example of this understanding gap is people thinking interior designers choose color schemes, sconces, and throw pillows. That is an interior decorator—- someone who’s professionally tasteful. An interior designer has an architecture license and designs the inside of buildings, often including everything from where fire exits are, where utility lines flow, what floors everything is on, and even things like wayfinding signage. Even the most visual practical design is often more about visual hierarchy, semiotics, using gestalt to convey informational relationships, and conceptual thinking than taste. Edit: Not sure why your comment was flagged?!
- rvz 7mo agoWell, nope. There are three real moats left in software: Distribution, Data (Proprietary) and Iteration Speed. Very successful companies have all three: Stripe, Meta, Google, Amazon.
- wavemode 7mo agoThe moat of all four of those companies is simply infrastructure, partnerships, and plain-old name recognition. Data and iteration speed aren't moats. I don't know what you mean by "distribution".
- anonyfox 7mo agoIn fact proprietary data IS a moat in certain circumstances. Example: German law, in order to create anything proper a lawyer NEEDS to read up specific commentary („Beck“) that requires a paid access and the data never was party of any LLM corpus since it only exists behind a paywall and otherwise is defended by lawyers. Therefore any german legal advice given from chatbots always (>80%) is flat out wrong even harmful at times if things would go to court.
- verdverm 7mo agoRelated: https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/ https://blog.kinglycrow.com/no-skill-no-taste/ Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089907
- dlev_pika 7mo agoRick Rubin said it best. https://youtu.be/jg1WUOxY6Cg?si=0ajVvgKnyuSz0e2Y https://youtu.be/jg1WUOxY6Cg?si=0ajVvgKnyuSz0e2Y
- dietr1ch 7mo agono share Id link: https://youtu.be/jg1WUOxY6Cg https://youtu.be/jg1WUOxY6Cg
- everyone 7mo agoI dont buy the authors argument. Not much has changed imo. Mediocre slop has always been the easiest thing to generate.
- dist-epoch 7mo agoAh, the classic "we'll ship production to China and just do design and marketing in US, because we have taste on what to build, and China doesn't". That worked really well...
- ValentineC 7mo agoIf you replace "China" with some other countries with large offshore engineering centres, your statement would still hold true today. China managed to copy, improve, and localise for their Chinese-reading market, then oust competition through good use of the Great Firewall (though I wonder if that specifically was an unintended consequence). Many other countries, especially the English-speaking ones that don't have a great firewall to keep their market buying locally, still need to compete with US tech giants for "taste".
- anonzzzies 7mo agoI use AI for code and we review that code and write tests ourselves first which the AI cannot touch. For writing we hardly ever do, unless we know the requester of something is incompetent and will never read it anyway; then it is a waste of time to do anything, but they expect something substantial and nice looking to tick a few boxes. It is great for that; a large bank with 40 layers of management, all equally incompetent, asked for a 'all encompassing technical document vault'; one of them sent an 'expectation document' which contained so much garbage as to show they did not even know what they were asking, but 1000s of pages was the expectation. So sure, claude will write that in an hour, notebooklm will add 100 slidedecks for juiceness. At first sight it looks amazing; its probably mostly accurate as well, but who knows; they will never ever read it; no one will. We got the 20m+ (with many opportunities to grow much larger) project. Before that was only in reach of the huge consultants (where everyone in those management levels worked before probably) who we used to lose against. Slop has its purpose.
- inerte 7mo agoAh, Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Designer vs 41 shades of blue. This is nothing new. There's space for everybody.
- danielvaughn 7mo agoDisagree with the overall argument. Human effort is still a moat. I've been spending the past couple of months creating a codebase that is almost entirely AI-generated. I've gotten way further than I would have otherwise at this pace, but it was still a lot of effort, and I still wasted time going down rabbit holes on features that didn't work out. There's some truth in there that judgement is as important as ever, though I'm not sure I'd call it taste. I'm finding that you have to have an extremely clear product vision, along with an extremely clear language used to describe that product, for AI to be used effectively. Know your terms, know how you want your features to be split up into modules, know what you want the interfaces of those modules to be. Without the above, you run into the same issue devs would run into before AI - the codebase becomes an incoherent mess, and even AI can't untangle it because the confusion gets embedded into its own context.
- taude 7mo agoI feel like you're pretty strongly agreeing that taste is important: " I'm finding that you have to have an extremely clear product vision..."" Clear production vision that you're building the right thing in the right way -- this involves a lot of taste to get right. Good PMs have this. Good enginers have this. Visionary leaders have this.... The execution of using AI to generate the code and other artifacts, is a matter of skill. But without the taste that you're building the right thing, with the right features, in a revolutionary way that will be delightful to use.... I've looked at three non-engineer vibe-coded businesses in the past month, and can tell that without taste, they're building a pretty mediocre product at best. The founders don't see it yet. And like the article says, they're just setting themselves up for mediocrity. I think any really good PM would be able to improve all these apps I looked at almost immediately.
- arnorhs 7mo agoThe way I understood it, the original article is saying the _only_ remaining differentiator is taste and the comment you replied to is saying "wrong, there are also other things, such as effort". I don't necessarily interpret the comment you replied to as saying that "taste is not important", which seems like what you are replying to, just that it's not the only remaining thing. I agree that taste gets you far. And I agree with all the examples of good taste that you brought up. But even with impeccable taste, you still need to learn, try things, have ideas, change your mind etc.. putting all of that in the bucket of "taste" is stretching it.. However, having good taste when putting in the effort, gets your further than with effort alone. In fact, effort alone gets you nowhere, and taste alone gets you nowhere. Once you marry the two you get somewhere.
- jrm4 7mo agoIt buried the more important point, one tech hasn't learned yet. Taste may be kind of important because it helps toward the truly important thing, which is skin-in-the-game. But also, with the right skin-in-the-game, you don't even need "taste." You just need real life consequences, which we don't do enough in tech.
- nate8bit 7mo ago> A practical loop for training taste Taste is cheap. Taste (or a rudimentary version of it at least) is something you start with at the beginning of your career. Taste is the thing that tells you "this is fucking cool", or "I don't know why but this just looks right". LLM's are not going to replicate that because it's not a human and taste isn't something you can make. Now - MAKING something that "looks right" is hard, and because LLM's are churning out the middle - the middle is moving somewhere else. Just like rich people during the summer.
- LurkandComment 7mo agoThink about moats in long term vs short term: Speed and distribution aren't a long-run moat because they are something AI can canabalize in a platform. Eventually they will coexist on your distribution base and offer it at a lower cost than you. Its a mote if it holds up before you exit at a high valuation... which a lot are setup to do. Taste: that's interesting. There is an argument there. It's hard to keep in the long-run and requires a lot of reinvestment in new talent Proprietary data: Yes, very much so. Trade Craft: Your new shiney system will still have to adhere to methods of of old clunky real world systems. Example, evidence for court. Methods for investigations. This is going to be industry specific, but you'd be surprised how many there are. This is long-term. Those who have the moat should focus on short burts of meaningful changes as they will rely heavily on gaining trust in established systems. In those places its more about trusting whats going on than doing it faster and better, so you want trust + faster and/or better.
- tayo42 7mo ago> That is why so much AI-generated work feels familiar: This was already a complaint people had before Ai. Like when logos and landing pages all used to look the same. Or coffee shops all looking the same.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoOr cars, or apartment buildings, or houses, or....
- boshalfoshal 7mo agoI think "taste" is definitely an overused meme at this point, its like tech twitter discovered this word in 2024 and never stopped using it (same with "agency", "high leverage", etc). Having read the article, I think I see the author's argument (*). I think "taste" here in an engineering context basically just comes down to an innate feeling of what engineering or product directions are right or wrong. I think this is different from the type of "taste" most people here are talking about, though I'm sure product "taste" specifically is somewhat correlated with your overall "taste." Engineering "taste" seems more correlated with experience building systems and/or strong intuitions about the fundamentals. I think this is a little different from the totally subjective, "vibes based taste" that you might think of in the context of design or art. Now where I disagree is that 1. "taste" is a defensible moat 2. "taste" is "ai-proof" to some extent "Taste" is only defensible to the extent that knowing what to do and cutting off the _right_ cruft is essential to moving faster. Moving faster and out executing is the real "moat" there. And obviously any cognitive task, including something as nebulous as "taste," can in theory be done by a sufficiently good AI. Clarity of thought when communicating with AI is, imo, not "taste." Talking specifically about engineering - the article talks about product constraints and tradeoffs. I'd argue that these are actually _data_ problems, and once you solve those, tradeoffs and solving for constraints go from being a judgement call to being a "correct" solution. That is to say, if you provide more information to your AI about your business context, the less judgement _you_ as the implementer need to give. This thinking is in line with what other people here have already said (real moats are data, distribution, execution speed). I think there's something a bit more interesting to say about the user empathy part, since it could be difficult for LLMs to truly put themselves in users shows when designing some interactive surfaces. But I'm sure that can be "solved" too, or at least, it can be done with far less human labor than it already takes. In general though, tech people are some of the least tasteful people, so its always funny to see posts like this.
- micromacrofoot 7mo agotaste isn't a moat at all because it's so variable, in fact this stuff will start dictating what taste is through broad proliferation you already see it on facebook with all the ai generated meme sharing... taste is being eroded there
- johnfn 7mo agoIt is profoundly ironic that this article is AI generated.
- paganel 7mo agoWas looking for this comment. How can people still read AI slop like this?
- abkolan 7mo agoLooks like the comments on this article are too.
- roncesvalles 7mo agoRoncesvalles' law: Bad posts have bad comments.
- janalsncm 7mo agoDoes this imply that good posts do not have bad comments?
- phainopepla2 7mo agoNo
- roncesvalles 7mo agoIt's more about the average quality of comments.
- jdpigeon 7mo agoSeriously. Very Claude-y vibes from this post. I guess the value of human effort doesn’t extend to writing your own blog posts
- Yokohiii 7mo agoHe has taste. The LLM knows that and creates a tasteful article. /s
- JSR_FDED 7mo agoDesigners and product managers were showing Steve Jobs all the fancy things the new app for writing DVDs could do. Steve Jobs stopped them, drew a square on the whiteboard and said “anything the user drags into this square gets written to the DVD” - that is taste!
- codemog 7mo agoThis cope is insane. Even simple projects generated by Claude are riddled with bugs. And there’s no way in hell it could generate a larger scoped project without a lot of manual human intervention. But yea, TODO apps and trivial calculators are effectively “solved”. Same with leetcode. I guess that’s probably the limit of many people’s imagination these days.
- simianwords 7mo agoI agree with the author and I think this is turning everyone into an investor. How I view (financial) investing as a career is that it is less manual and more taste oriented. You put your stake in the things you feel will work out and taste here just means the judgement required to make good calls. A person with good taste would have a better idea of capital allocation. What AI is doing is making all of us investors instead of doers. "Doing" is no longer something praiseworthy - what will become praiseworthy is how your taste has turned out in hindsight. I'm seeing this at work. More or less everyone can do tasks well. But what's harder now is the more subtle task of taking bets and seeing it work over a few months or years.
- elmean 7mo ago> Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left > YC startups are doomed
- abkolan 7mo agoEver since Rick Rubin has been on his book tour, he has become the patron saint of Product Manger Tech Twitter.
- nayuki 7mo agoReminds me of PG's classic essay, "Taste for Makers" (2002): https://paulgraham.com/taste.html https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
- yawnxyz 7mo agoGood judgment and effort has always been the "real moat" - in arts, music, science, food, product... There's always been ways to "flatten the middle" - by outsourcing, by using pre-packaged goods, with industrialization... So yeah we've always loved handcrafted, exquisite things; there's never been a "moat" in middle It doesn't mean you can't make a good living without a moat though
- dfxm12 7mo agoTaste shows up in three places: What you notice What you reject How precisely you can explain what feels wrong I think it's just as important, if not more, to be able to explain what is right and what you accept. Having a well defined acceptance criteria also fits into existing project management frameworks. These criteria are generally based on asking users. The article mentions, You do not get a spreadsheet that tells you which sentence will make a customer care, which feature is worth a month of engineering time, or which design crosses the line from polished to forgettable. And this is why you talk to your customers.
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoTry using a coding agent to write an efficient GPU kernel. I guess they might get good at it soon, but they definitely aren't there yet.
- osti 7mo agoI had a very complex cuda kernel and codex cli managed to improve the throughout 20x.
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoHmm, I still have some nonrefundable API credits with OpenAI. Maybe I should try to use them for my kernel. FWIW, this talk[1] from NVIDIA/Meta from March claims that coding agents can often write correct implementations of of CUDA kernels, but that they're usually dog slow, like 100x slower than a kernel optimized by a skilled human. [1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtc26-s81653/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtc26-s81653/
- osti 7mo agoFor me it was able to try out different architectures for perf improvement, then once it's settled on some good architectures, it can do lower level optimizations on them by profiling the code etc.
- AlexCoventry 7mo agoThat's great. It seems like a large body of experts are having real problem with this, so maybe you should publish something about your methods, or start a business...
- osti 7mo agoI can't vouch for whether or not it can beat human experts though because I'm no CUDA expert myself. The original CUDA code were human written and I first let codex adapt it to my specific use case. Then I basically let codex generate ideas and try the ideas out itself (I think it's a bit like Karpathy's autoresearch, except I was still doing manual prompting). And that was enough to get me 20x improvement. I suspect when people said AI wrote non performant CUDA kernels it was beginning-mid last year and it's definitely vastly improved since back then. And the agent's ability to iteratively improve really impressed me.
- lostathome 7mo agoI already disagree with the first line: competent output is not cheap. At least if defined as a final product. - Just think about scientific research. Lots of data analysis results are not cheap to get. - Even vibe coding is difficult: you need to think very hard about what you want. What is cheaper now are some building blocks. We just have a new definition of building blocks. But putting the blocks is still hard.
- roncesvalles 7mo ago>AI and LLMs have changed one thing very quickly: competent output is now cheap. Already wrong.
- minutesmith 7mo ago[flagged]
- periodjet 7mo agoIt has been for a while. Hollywood and other outlets didn’t need AI tools to create abysmal slop.
- drob518 7mo agoIMO, taste has always been one of the strongest moats because we struggle to define what good taste even is. We know it when we see it, but other than pointing to examples, we can’t really describe it in general terms. I still remember a line from Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters where he was describing the difficulty of hiring software engineers. He says he was talking with a colleague after an interview and remarked (I’m paraphrasing), “I know he can write code. But does he have taste?” Taste is something we all want our colleagues and products and services to have, but defining it is really difficult. And yes, I fully agree with the writer that it’s important more than ever in this age of AI where generation is cheap.
- heliumtera 7mo agoArticle assumed as absolute truth, without explanation, that competent systems can be effortlessly implemented. If one disagrees with that's statement, there is nothing of value to extract from this article. Words are cheap, bullet point are cheap.
- jatins 7mo agoTitle: Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left Followed by an entire AI generated fluff piece https://www.pangram.com/history/347cd632-809c-4775-b457-d9bc3cd83d1e https://www.pangram.com/history/347cd632-809c-4775-b457-d9bc... Flagged
- nunez 7mo agoEvery fucking time. I hate this timeline.
- solaire_oa 7mo agoI got to the second section before I decided to scan how long it was, saw a wall of text, and decided that this article was low taste. Moreover, the submitter of this article (probably not the author) spams ~4 submissions per day.
- 30minAdayHN 7mo agoI think there is a parallel to what happened to watch market with Quartz crisis. The same way Quartz has led to decline of Swiss movements, LLMs are going to have a huge effect on developer market. I hypothesize that in future there will be a micro segment which care about quality, taste, exclusivity etc the same way the luxury watch makers found a niche. My perspective is that this "taste" or "quality" will not be a moat. Instead, it will be a niche where only a small segment would care about it. (edit: typos)
- mkw5053 7mo agoDidn't PG write a post about this like a month ago?
- acuozzo 7mo ago> AI and LLMs have changed one thing very quickly: competent output is now cheap. If you're working on something not truly novel, sure. If you're using LLMs to assist in e.g. Mathematics work on as-yet-unproven problems, then this is hardly the case. Hell, if we just stick to the software domain: Gemini3-DeepThink, GPT-5.4pro, and Opus 4.6 perform pretty "meh" writing CUDA C++ code for Hopper & Blackwell. And I'm not talking about poorly-spec'd problems. I'm talking about mapping straightforward mathematics in annotated WolframLanguage files to WGMMA with TMA.
- liuliu 7mo agoI am not sure you set it up right. Did you have a runnable WolframLanguage file so it can compare results? Did you give it H100 / H200 access to compile and then iterate? My experience is that once you have these two, it does amazing kernel work (Codex-5.4).
- acuozzo 7mo ago> Did you have a runnable WolframLanguage file so it can compare results? Yes. > Did you give it H100 / H200 access to compile and then iterate? Yes via Lambda.ai. Also, FWIW, I run claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions and codex with the equivalent flag. > it does amazing kernel work (Codex-5.4) Specifically with WGMMA + TMA? --- Once TMA gets involved both Claude and Codex spin endlessly until they dump TMA for a slower fallback. I've observed this with Claude-Code having Opus 4.6 reasoning set to medium, high, and max; "adaptive thinking" enabled and disabled; and I've made sure to max-out thinking tokens. I've also observed this with Codex GPT-5.4 in addition to GPT-5.3-Codex with reasoning efforts from medium to xhigh. --- I've also observed this on the web, as mentioned in my OP, with GPT-5.4pro (Extended Pro), Gemini3-DeepThink, and Opus 4.6.
- liuliu 7mo agoThat is informative, thanks! Yes, I observe the same thing as the model tends to give up (like you said, "dump TMA for a slower fallback") and needs active steering to get good results. But it indeed works further than one-shot from Chat interface and knows much more about profiling / kernel coding than these.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rickcarlino 7mo agoDoes anyone remember this quote by Why the Lucky Stiff: “When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability.”
- layer8 7mo agoI'm sure this can be solved by A/B tasting. ;)
- skejeke 7mo agolol the unfortunate truth is that hundreds of billions and trillions will be spent to learn a single truth: Taste cannot simply be bought nor can you bring products that add value into the world through sheer will of training machines.
- crabsand 7mo agoThe only real moat is care. It was, it is, it will be.
- jryio 7mo agoNo one was discussing 'taste' until pg's article. After a decade with tech people I can confidently say that most of them have zero taste because they have little to no exposure to the world outside of their bubble. It's frankly pathetic to see how techno-optimists think that innovations like driverless cars will simply be happy pills to be swallowed by the masses who make a fractional amount of money to them. As a species we have quite literally killed each other for less.
- minutesmith 7mo ago[flagged]
- xnx 7mo agoPage title is "Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left"
- studio-m-dev 7mo ago[flagged]
- coolThingsFirst 7mo agoI get very bad results for frontend. The results look boring and obviously made by ai.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- kilbey1 7mo ago[dead]
- socketcluster 7mo agoThis is a great point. I'm really concerned about it. Most people seem to have poor taste and like what is most generic because generic is familiar.
- hamasho 7mo agoI get really skeptical when someone says "AI does most of the work just by asking simple prompts." Don't get me wrong, I use AI too for daily tasks and my job as a programmer, and it definitely helps me get the job done faster (sometimes it's almost instant). But it still requires a lot of effort for complex or unconventional tasks. When I hear "AI does most of my job", I think of DOGE employees who use AI to identify "waste of money". All they do is ask AI with very lazy prompts like "list DEI projects" with the list of government sponsored projects including simple descriptions. They don't even provide what DEI means. And they just cut all projects the AI flagged. I'm sure their "productivity" is very high. They can "complete the job" that would require days, weeks, or months of investigation with a single prompt. I also think the results have a strong tendency to flag a project as DEI, because "is this DEI" is a question often asked by racists and misogynists on right-wing websites, and often the answers are "Yes", and that likely causes a strong bias. [1] https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/doge-chatgpt-dei-funding-colorado-projects/73-e8c7a258-039d-459d-8aba-247e3454bbe3 https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/doge-chatgpt-dei...
- marcus_holmes 7mo agoI'm not sure this is only true of LLMs - most corporate sites are very similar. Professional designers learn very quickly not to be too quirky or unique. I think this is symptomatic of humans - our comfort zone is the "7 out of 10" morass of similarity and blandness. We are herd animals. LLMs are just reflecting this. And I don't think our tendency to herd will allow us to select the quirky outliers even if that's the only distinguishing characteristic of non-LLM output.
- PaulShomo 7mo agoThere's perception of value in the quirky outliers, and there's liking a trendy cow, in the herd-mindset signaling kind of way. We definitely have both style of aficionados, each could be said to be appreciating a different kind of taste.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- meander_water 7mo agoNot only is the article AI generated, it's recycling a shallow pov that hundreds of other people are just copying. Just google "taste is the new moat" Doesn't deserve to be on the front page.
- dzonga 7mo agoworse is better wins again. there's a reason people prefer aged products - they gain a character of their own, similar to art or works produced under constraints.