The rise of Taste

AI makes it more important than ever to choose well

In the past 30 days, I’ve written (well, caused to be written) more lines of code, than in the entire rest of my career (I measured - currently closing in on 1M lines of code). And it’s not just “TikTok for programmers” as a skeptical friend called it. One of the things I’ve built is something I call the “dev foundry” - a process, and program, for building other programs, whose jobs are to build and run complex development processes. One of these “dev machines” spent the last 9 days building a high fidelity clone of Word, but with web technologies. One built “openClaw but for enterprise m365”. One built a security filter product for agents that is also meant for enterprise. Each of these runs largely independently - including design, testing, and pushing to staging.

This is an extreme form of what is usually known as an “agentic harness” - software that makes the underlying model more effective. Models on their own can’t run for weeks at a time, but the harness (‘dev machine’) can - it can manage memory (state), start and stop process, make tool calls, etc. And the recent wave of models is good enough that they can help build the harnesses - much of what I do is improving the tool itself, as I find errors and gaps, or have new ideas. At this point I am largely limited by my own ability to pay attention and verify the output (remember that - we’ll come back to it in a minute).

So…who cares? Programmers are happy, the field of programming is going to be disrupted in some way that no one quite understands yet¹. If you’re not a programmer, why be bothered?

Well…”code goes first”, right?² Much of the world is digital now, or accessible to software. Is that “money” in your “bank” “account”, or entries in a database? I could go on - look around though and most of what you see is impacted by software somehow - your clothes are designed, manufactured, shipped, advertised and sold with it, your food is grown with it, your rent is paid with it…the world is a largely digital place now. Beyond that, much of what we do in the modern world is think - we do accounting, marketing, medicine, investment, law…a great deal of economic activity is thinking, thinking is another word for software, and it’s all digital now.

So, what is happening for programmers is going to start spreading into other realms soon. It’s easy to look at just the base models and see errors and limitations (and it’s surprising to me how many people who are critical have either never seriously tried to use these tools or use the free (and dumber) versions. It’s a bit like saying “I chatted with a high school student who thought they might want to go into medicine someday. I wasn’t impressed. I’ll stick with the witch doctor”). Building a domain-specific harness for a model can improve performance dramatically (one of my side projects is a foundry for domain experts that does continual “adult education” for itself).

So, what happens when you can build, or do, or think about anything? The cost of “capability” is collapsing. In a world where anyone can do “anything”, what starts to matter more is something like taste, and judgement: what you choose to do is more important now than that you can do it. Coding skills that I had 30 years ago, that were rare and valuable, are more or less free now. But my taste as a designer and architect is important - I often build better things, or more successful ones, than others, because I can make better choices.

I’ve thought for a while now that we need to collectively become better if we are going to survive and thrive with AI. All technology can be used for good or evil purposes, and this is a very powerful technology. That’s not novel. What I think is a bit more novel is that we also have to be better individually. We have to be curious, we have to choose well, we have to be thoughtful about how we personally use these tools. We can create AI slop that distracts and annoys others and mostly doesn’t add value. Or we can be thoughtful and use this new form of thought to better educate, help, and take care of each other.

The models are brilliant, and capable, but also dumb. They’re happy to do what we ask, even if it’s pointless (mostly they try not to do anything that’s actually harmful). As capable as they are now, they are only going to get better. Choice, and taste, is only going to matter more.

Code goes first, but it’s not the only thing. We all have to learn to choose well.

1. My bet is that software is going to become more like media, and for the same reasons: the ease of creation will cause existing bundles to fall apart. This means there will be a) more software, b) it will be more fragmented and transient, c) with lots of amateur and “improper” creators and d) huge power laws where network effects, accidental first mover advantage, and random taste will matter disproportionately.

2. I’ve been writing about this for a while now, I still very much believe it.