Something I've been thinking about a lot is that ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste. Even with humans, each of us has different values, intent, and taste, although we do share many of these things. As a living human being, you have biological or cultural desires and particular goals that you want to accomplish while you're alive on this earth.

When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.

When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.

▲ 0c3ca83 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.

It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.

Agentic coding is a replacement for your agency.

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allenu 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good point. What I'm thinking is probably more like individual taste. An AI trained is kind of a collection of different tastes. What would be interesting is to see is if a "collective" taste that would yield good products on its own. Design by committee often creates things that have conflicting points of view. Can a trained AI do better than design by committee? It's obviously not a committee and not an individual (at least in the human sense). Is there something inherent in following general principles that makes it difficult to have a specific point of view in the creation of a product? My thinking is it's probably possible to train AI to have, say, an "Apple taste" and make good Apple-like products but that taste might not be suitable for particular products or needs. A "Linux taste" might be better for some things, but not for others, and so on. If we did get to that point, then there'd still be a need for a choice to be made about what particular "taste hat" to put on, and likely an AI can be trained to do even that. Definitely an interesting thing to ponder!

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foodevl 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel that AI does have individual taste (and even "personality"), but it's the same monotonous individual taste across all instances of the same trained AI. The sheer scale of its repetition turns it into a hated trope: like how we can immediately identify slop writing, diagrams, websites, etc.

I'm sure we've all met someone who has a unique speaking style and might repeat phrases or words unusually often, but that still doesn't bug us as much as "the honest truth.." or "load-bearing.."

	▲	calvinmorrison an hour ago \| parent [-]
		it must be what TV was like in the 60s. only a few channels. everyone had the same jokes the next day in school or work. We all saw the same episodes. In this way each time ChatGPT or Claude is released, new memetic phrasology is emitted into the human psyche at astoundind speed.

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majormajor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not convinced that "more training" is a silver bullet here because "for you and the people you learned from" is a subset—potentially a tiny one—of the world of potential training data.

Even with newer model generations larger efforts still seem to drift back towards "default choices" vs "steered specific aims."

In many areas, "good" taste is not particularly good anymore when it's everything's default style.

The edge then becomes finding the niches that (a) can be better served w/ non-defaults and (b) have economic characteristics that make it worth catering towards those.

I think the days of one-size-fits-all huge-scale-and-ROI SaaS swiss army knives are quite numbered, but I think the replacement world could be a much more vibrant ecosystem with a much more varied set of players.

▲ pianopatrick 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can add values to your AGENTS.md and that will affect how the AI works. For instance you can say stuff like "on this project our top value is that the code front end should be as fast as possible" and you'll get different results than if you say "on this project our top value is that the front end should be as simple as possible"

▲ willy_k 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision.

I don’t see how this is any different. The input comes in a different section of context and potentially before rather than after generation, but that doesn’t change that human taste is needed.

▲ ORDINAND_PIZZA 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

i don’t think they’re the same kind of value. AI wants to solve your problem, it doesn’t care about you (or your users). it doesn’t know what love or loss feels like. you can try to explain that to it all day, it just doesn’t care like a human can. it doesn’t know why, it doesn’t care why.

▲ AlienRobot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wrote in my AGENTS.md "do not use chained ternary operators." I'm still waiting for it to work.

▲ userbinator 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would actually prefer chained ternaries over more verbose if/else expressions with duplicated LHS, so this does go back to the argument about "taste".

▲ AlienRobot an hour ago | parent [-]

This is one of the things I like about Rust. You can have both.

    let foo = {
        if bar {
            1
        } else if baz {
            2
        } else {
            3
        }
    };

Unfortunately not all languages are Rust.

▲ userbinator an hour ago | parent [-]

That isn't more concise than

   foo = bar ? 1
             : baz ? 2
                   : 3;

	▲	AlienRobot 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But it's more readable, and that's what matters.

▲ pianopatrick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're better off using linting for something specific like that.

▲ louiskottmann an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Taste only matter insofar you work is shared.

AI lets people get personalized software for "free" as derivative of existing work. Think adobe suite but with the 5% that an individual needs.

Then taste loses value as everyone has their own software.

That's where I am in that train of thought at least. Pretty grim I know.

▲ rectang 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste

I sometimes think, "what art would a rogue AI consciousness create to satiate its own artistic impulses?"

If the target audience was fellow rogue AI entities, I don't think there's any guarantee that such art would be compelling to humans, or even comprehensible.

And if its a human directing the AI so that the output is compelling to humans, then there's a human in the loop, whose "values, intent, and taste" matter.

▲ shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste

How do you know that? AI is also software. Who controls that software?

Plus, AI picking up data from real human means they will also incure bias aka "taste".