There's been a lot of discussion around in the future how "taste" will be the only differentiation / moat (recently watched a good video about the gen-ai music industry), as everything will be trivially easy to recreate. But your vision and how well you execution it... and the nuance involved in getting every minor detail correct is much harder (and something the LLM is exactly average at). I recently experienced this while vibing the duckdb vscode extension "I always wanted". Code is 100% LLM generated, but I think I probably have well over 1000 turns of conversation at this point to make every detail exactly as I want it.

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

I don't know where this leaves us, but it's going to be interesting/scary to live through what seems to be coming.

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embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

Why is it easy to copy?

I too have written a tiny essay on this topic (https://emsh.cat/good-taste/) but I don't see how "taste" is easy to copy, at least I haven't been convinced by any of the arguments people chucked at me so far.

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cjonas 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it's easier to clone someone else's "good taste" by just mimic'ing their formula / ripping of their exact implementation of a feature/ui. The gap between "first to get it right" and "everyone else catches up" could become non-existent in software. You'd need to continuously innovate (I think to some degree, this has always been the case, but it's the tempo that has changing).

> Why is it easy to copy? I think music trends would be one historical example of this? With software it's a bit more concrete (I'll just make my app function EXACTLY like yours does) and there is less protection from the law, unless you manage to weasel your way into a patent.

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embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> Because it's easier to clone someone else's "good taste" by just mimic'ing their formula / ripping of their exact implementation of a feature/ui.

But then you've only copied one of their choices made by their good taste, not actually copied their taste. If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. Basically, it doesn't generalize.

	▲	lelanthran 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If a new situation arises, you won't be able to make the same choice as they would. They won't be able to, but they won't need to either - they can just continue cribbing off the original person, or if they are unable to continue cribbing off the same person, they'll find someone else to crib off. The point is, for all these people outsourcing their thinking, they will always have someone to crib off.
	▲	cjonas 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I get that, but you can just "pin" to someone else's taste and they can effectively never get ahead for more than a few minutes. I think (and hope) this won't be as big a problem in the arts because "authenticity" matters to most people, but I for the software industry it feels very disruptive (assuming the models continue to improve and are accessible).

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mjr00 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;)

Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter.

If you actually try looking at places where people show off their taste--scrolling through the latest songs on Soundcloud being a great source--you realize that people just pump out terrible stuff without realizing it's terrible. This was true pre-AI, and AI it hasn't made it any less true.

It's similar to the transition from live instruments to the DAW in the music world. The DAW eliminated all physical training requirements for making music, and opened up massive new worlds for the types of music that could be made. The end result was a handful of great things amidst a sea of garbage.

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cjonas 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Just to be clear, I don't feel this is actually the case in world of music and art, at least as an individual consumer. I would argue the industry & economy rewards it though.

In software it feels different though. If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

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embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

It's the same argument people used to use against open sourcing your code for a SaaS: "If I can just clone the repository and run the service myself, why is there a hosted product?"

There is so much more going on though, from how you run something, to how you can react to changes and how you perpetually try to avoid the spaghetti ball from building, so improvements don't take longer and longer to implement and break other things.

Even if the original code is the same, two operators of that service can lead to two very different experiences, not to mention how the service will look like in a year.

	▲	cjonas 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would say almost all of these companies do have part of their stack as private IP, but regardless that's a good point... Hope your right! I imagine the truth will fall somewhere in between our difference in opinion

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andsoitis 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you define taste (rough is fine)?

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markbao 7 hours ago | parent [-]

An intuition for what people like.

Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.

	▲	aytigra 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'd say it is quite opposite, a deep understanding of what you like and consequently understanding what will make a creation into exactly what you like. (Well I guess some people can create without understanding, just directly expressing their likes) Since many of our likes are driven by our shared culture and physiology, many other people will appreciate such creation (even if they don't understand why exactly they like it). Others will appreciate depth of nuance and uniqueness of your creation. Opposite to taste is approximated "good" average which is likeable but just never hits all the right notes, and at the same time already suffering from sameness fatigue.
	▲	bandrami 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's subjective in the philosophical sense (the subject of the predication is involved with the judgment itself) but that doesn't mean it can't be "right" (and probably more importantly, "wrong").