Taste Is All That's Left ↑#Taste Is All That s Left Published August 6, 202616 min read SourcethoughtsprogrammingsoftwareTable of ContentsPost Mortem Hey. I’ve been kindly informed that this post has
By Coderz Club · 2026-08-07 · Tags: coding
Taste Is All That's Left
↑#Taste Is All That s Left Published August 6, 202616 min read SourcethoughtsprogrammingsoftwareTable of ContentsPost Mortem Hey. I’ve been kindly informed that this post has hit the frontpage of Hacker News, and combing through the comments I have been shown that this post reads of as what I would describe as, well, AI slop. If this is a concern of yours, please honor me with a quick glance at the post-mortem section below. Thanks! For most of the time I have been writing software—which, compared to some of my readers, is not that long—I have come to believe that the hard thing was making the thing exist at all. This is not necessarily a new belief of mine. I started through the difficult and tedious experience of building web applications and watching them crash and burn. You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it. That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. 1 You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it much faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing. Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It simply… moves. The Bar Went Somewhere We keep asking whether the machines are any good. Even yesterday I had a rather short discussion on whether they are reliable. While we have concluded that they are “reliably unreliable,” I think it is the wrong question. The output is good enough, generally anyway, and that is the problem—most of it, at least. 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. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter, and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor. That floor is now gone. And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it. It is you. Your judgement. The verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function and know, somehow, that two of them are wrong. That verdict has a name we are slightly embarrassed to use in engineering circles, because it sounds soft and unfalsifiable and vaguely aristocratic. Taste. What Taste Actually Is I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration. A matter of preferences. Whether you like your braces on the same line. That is not what I mean. Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it. He called it Quality. His argument, roughly, was that you recognise Quality before you can explain it— that the recognition comes first and the reasons arrive later, if they arrive at all. A good mechanic knows the engine is wrong before he knows why. A good editor feels the sentence sag before she can name the clause that failed. 2 Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is partially 3 the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument. And it is not soft at all. It is the hardest thing in the work, because it is the only part that was never mechanical to begin with. Everything downstream of the verdict—the typing, the syntax, the wiring of one library to another—was always, in principle, automatable. We just had not gotten around to it. The verdict was the thing the machine could not do for you. It still cannot. It can only make the absence of it cheaper to ignore. Taste Is Downstream of Friction Here is the uncomfortable mechanism, the part I would rather not think about. Where did your taste come from? No really. Where did it come from, was it genetic? Were you abducted by aliens one day that forcefully injected your sense of taste into your mind and wiped your memory? I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion
↑#Taste Is All That s Left Published August 6, 202616 min read SourcethoughtsprogrammingsoftwareTable of ContentsPost Mortem Hey. I’ve been kindly informed that this post has hit the frontpage of Hacker News, and combing through the comments I have been shown that this post reads of as what I would describe as, well, AI slop. If this is a concern of yours, please honor me with a quick glance at the post-mortem section below. Thanks! For most of the time I have been writing software—which, compared to some of my readers, is not that long—I have come to believe that the hard thing was making the thing exist at all. This is not necessarily a new belief of mine. I started through the difficult and tedious experience of building web applications and watching them crash and burn. You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it. That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. 1 You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it much faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing. Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It simply… moves. The Bar Went Somewhere We keep asking whether the machines are any good. Even yesterday I had a rather short discussion on whether they are reliable. While we have concluded that they are “reliably unreliable,” I think it is the wrong question. The output is good enough, generally anyway, and that is the problem—most of it, at least. 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. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter, and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor. That floor is now gone. And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it. It is you. Your judgement. The verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function and know, somehow, that two of them are wrong. That verdict has a name we are slightly embarrassed to use in engineering circles, because it sounds soft and unfalsifiable and vaguely aristocratic. Taste. What Taste Actually Is I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration. A matter of preferences. Whether you like your braces on the same line. That is not what I mean. Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it. He called it Quality. His argument, roughly, was that you recognise Quality before you can explain it— that the recognition comes first and the reasons arrive later, if they arrive at all. A good mechanic knows the engine is wrong before he knows why. A good editor feels the sentence sag before she can name the clause that failed. 2 Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is partially 3 the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument. And it is not soft at all. It is the hardest thing in the work, because it is the only part that was never mechanical to begin with. Everything downstream of the verdict—the typing, the syntax, the wiring of one library to another—was always, in principle, automatable. We just had not gotten around to it. The verdict was the thing the machine could not do for you. It still cannot. It can only make the absence of it cheaper to ignore. Taste Is Downstream of Friction Here is the uncomfortable mechanism, the part I would rather not think about. Where did your taste come from? No really. Where did it come from, was it genetic? Were you abducted by aliens one day that forcefully injected your sense of taste into your mind and wiped your memory? I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion