Developing Taste

I've always been a fan of Paul Graham's essay, "Taste for Makers". It's arguably more relevant today than when he wrote it in 2002.

https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

One of the biggest risks and sources of frustration in AI-native teams is an over-emphasis on taste leading to a doom loop where people (usually with product backgrounds new to the engineering mindset) spin their tires taking big swings unsystematically and without defining a clear exit condition.

I hope we as a community can develop the new agile or some sane process to ground ourselves in sooner than later...

This is just the intro. If you keep on with the following articles, they're about visual effects for stacked notification popups. They have good visuals, but if you have a stack of open notifications, something is wrong. If you have enough that you need a stack, users are going to want some way to put them in bins, order them, and generally manage them as a to-do list, like emails. At that point, they're not notifications, they're incoming messages.

No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.

Funny, I clicked on some of their projects. They had a popup drawer web widget. You can not choose how far it opens. It always slides all the way up or all the way down. I can't name how many times I've run into something similar where a form is in the drawer and the info I need to see to correctly fill it out is outside (or visa-versa) and because it won't let me adjust there is no way to see both pieces of info at the same time. Worse, if the form is in the drawer and I close it to find the info I need, it will end up clearing the form.

I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad).

Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!

Exposing yourself to great taste educates AND inspires. I love Peters Design Company and how amazing they are at identity branding.

Here's an example of rebranding Uhaul. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMU0G8h0pys

I'm building a Vocaloid music player with Claude Code. It worked on day one, but the colors were still the pale purple from another app of mine I had started from. I changed them to Miku's teal. That was the part I had to decide myself.

This article is filled with pseudo self-help advice for people who now think they need taste to level-up their the LLM skills.

> it’s a trained instinct. The ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. It’s why some designs feel effortless.

This is not really what "taste" is.

Some designs feel effortless because someone practiced/trained so they could execute on their taste. Taste is extremely cheap - execution is still very hard.

Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.

It's great that we're calling for "taste" in software, but could we pick a less snobbish word? Like "care" or "empathy"?

> If you’re a designer, don’t just use apps, study them. Why does a specific interaction feel good?3 If you’re a filmmaker, don’t just watch movies, think about why the director made the choices they did.

This is AI-generated.

all the enterprise was missing, all along, was taste

Almost universally the worst designs come from designers.

Example: only someone who fetishized design would make a keyboard the didn't work just so it could be a mm thinner.

The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.

people say taste is the differentiator but I hate that because taste is personal, whereas culture is communal

taste without curation for the community, with an eye to what is culturally edifying, is just consumerism

Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such.

Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.

Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.

Don’t beat around the bush.