I don't know man. I'm writing a flashcard app, and I like it. It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want. BC I could never get into quizlet. Whatever. Maybe others will like it, maybe not, I don't care.
Taste is subjective. Having 1 million todo apps, great. Maybe someone I know will find one they like and tell me about it. Maybe I'll find one that doesn't suck. Maybe I'll just make my own.
One thing I won't do though, is complain about how there's now 1 million todo apps that aren't up to my standards. Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful thing.
vunderba 33 minutes ago [-]
> Taste is subjective.
If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
fluoridation 16 minutes ago [-]
>I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "Because most people don't like it, it shouldn't exist"?
Aerroon 32 minutes ago [-]
I've done the same thing with a todo app.
I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.
I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.
moritzwarhier 36 minutes ago [-]
> It makes me happy and it works the way I want. Exactly how I want.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like (good) taste to me!
Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.
But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.
It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".
Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!
ianbutler 1 hours ago [-]
That's awesome! I love that energy, it's the opposite of the energy I was trying to talk about in the post actually, you're not trying to tell me why your app is the best thing in the world and spamming it everywhere when it has nothing to offer me or other people, and having not considered other people.
tptacek 3 minutes ago [-]
Where by "spamming" you mean daring to post it to HN under a "Show HN" title.
selridge 1 hours ago [-]
Why don’t you tell them that they have no taste?
Seems to be what the essay implies.
ianbutler 56 minutes ago [-]
Because right now they are actually being tasteful?
selridge 42 minutes ago [-]
I suspect because it’s harder to defend your thesis to a person who is excited about what they made.
It’s super easy to talk about who has taste or not in the abstract. A lot harder to tell someone straight up they have no taste because of some idea you have.
ianbutler 36 minutes ago [-]
Nope it's exactly what I said, by choosing not to put it out to all of us because its only for them, that is actually being tasteful. It's very simple.
AntiDyatlov 33 minutes ago [-]
> Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful
No. Silence is better than noise.
selridge 32 minutes ago [-]
Then put a sock in it
bartread 59 minutes ago [-]
I can’t actually get to the article on the WiFi network I’m on but when I see “No skill. No taste.” you don’t sound like the butt of that punchline. Clearly you at least have skill, and I’m in no position to judge your taste.
The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.
OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.
m132 1 hours ago [-]
Most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.
Is there nothing? Great, go ahead and fill the void.
Is there so much that it becomes overwhelming to even look? If so, ask yourself: does your thing have any significant differentiators? Are you willing to maintain it? Do you want the people who come after you to see one more option in the sea, or an existing project made better thanks to your changes?
It's about respecting the time of one another. If I'm looking for a to-do app, I'm looking for a good one, at least in the ways that matter to me. Not for thousands of applications with the same exact issues. And so are you. Nobody needs a million of options that suck. We all want a handful or ideally one that does the job.
Schiendelman 1 hours ago [-]
Instead of using third party apps for a todo list, I recently wrote myself a utility - a background process to reschedule iOS Reminders I don't get to, make sure every reminder I create actually gets a scheduled date/time, and to deconflict reminders from calendar entries if I get an overlap.
It took less than 90 minutes using claude code, I have a testflight I've shared with friends for feedback, and I'll probably put it out there for a dollar once I add a couple more settings.
The built in UIs, syncing, and integrations are really good. It took me a while to realize I didn't need another todo list app, just to tweak the built-ins.
PaulHoule 38 minutes ago [-]
It's a fairly radical idea that AI can (and should!) be doing things invisibly with existing platforms and avoid the whole nightmare of UI development.
CooCooCaCha 3 minutes ago [-]
I disagree, there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.
Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).
Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.
Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.
I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.
vunderba 59 minutes ago [-]
> does your thing have any significant differentiators?
When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
> The most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.
Yes, you should do discovery, but that alone is not sufficient to develop taste. Being an also-ran is low taste even if you religiously meet the market expectations by following a pattern. Just like in fashion, you need to understand the rules to know when its okay to break the rules so that you appear fashion-forward, that is a form of taste no differently.
selridge 41 minutes ago [-]
Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…
scoofy 13 minutes ago [-]
I suspect that in the future, apps will be like these blogs: most people will have them. The app authors will they they are great, most won't be great. Some will be great and hugely popular, many will be great but nobody will know or about them, because the attention economy is always hard.
I think that's fine.
What I really think is that most of the logical folks here think we ought to be focusing our attention and organizing to maximize the efficiency of app making, and that vibe-coding really blows that up, because there is no way to know what is quality and what is trash without actually having to do the work and figure that out. That does suck, but it's why creators should have blogs, github/bitbucket accounts, etc, to offer up their credibility to facilitate bona fides.
I think the programming industry is going to become a lot more like the indie game industry, where loose networks based on mutual respect start forming and critics review the newest apps, because you really don't want to waste a bunch actually using all the stuff.
It's inefficient, but that's life.
PaulHoule 23 minutes ago [-]
What I hated most about the NFT culture was being approached by people who wanted me to make NFTs out of my photographs and visual art.
At the time I was very much craving feedback and validation but I wanted honest validation, I knew some of what I was making was really good and some of what I was making was crap -- I wanted validation from people who could tell the difference, not from people for whom it was all the same.
Jimmc414 55 minutes ago [-]
I respect the feelings behind the post and I agree with a large part of it. I’m inclined to disagree on a few points made. The core problem is outsiders without taste are showing up in a space where there is a long history of dues paid by the current occupants. But how is taste developed? It’s not innate, unfortunately it’s a product of the long ugly process you are currently witnessing. Think back to the first program you were proud of and judge it with today’s eyes.
Surac 15 minutes ago [-]
Reading the title made me think about the USA King. You know the orange one.
pu_pe 29 minutes ago [-]
Ironic that you complain about people posting a to-do app because it's so common, and proceed to post the 100th AI rant of the day with absolutely no original thought in it.
ossa-ma 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, a positive from this is those with authenticity and taste will shine. Self-expression will be a form of resistance and we'll see a lot less homogenisation across things like writing, ui/ux, animation, individual websites, blogs.
Who knows maybe the old, scattered, personable, decentralised internet will come back - things like MySpace, geocities, sites like this (a lost art): https://www.cameronsworld.net/
Also taste comes from your ability to steer a model instead of having it steer you. e.g. a model suggests a basic pill button, you push back and curse it for its blandness and use it to design something new and novel.
cgriswald 1 hours ago [-]
I use LLMs in my fiction writing; and before the wolves come out to shred me to pieces: The LLM never gets to see my writing and doesn't do any of the writing for me. I use LLMs in other ways.
One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my resolution is bland and at worst cliche.
vunderba 45 minutes ago [-]
This is eerily similar to something I do with Hacker News stories that hit the front page. I run the post against a couple of LLMs (Mixtral, GPT-OSS, Qwen3, etc.) with the directive to produce a set of 20 of the most likely top-level replies.
I then wait a few days, and then use a couple of systems (embeddings, deBERTa, etc.) to rank comments by novelty against the LLM-produced replies.
bluefirebrand 1 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone bother creating or publishing anything new on the internet now that we know that AI companies are just waiting to hoover it up, without compensation, to enrich their models?
Seeing how predatory these companies are in their scraping and then continuing to publish where they can scrape is the absolute height of stupidity
pulvinar 1 hours ago [-]
I'd like to see the internet return to those who aren't putting it out there for money, so AI companies (and anyone else) hoovering it up wouldn't bother them. Sharing should be the point.
Would also result in fewer sites with ads -- yay!
sodapopcan 1 hours ago [-]
Physical media is already making a comeback, so let's hope it does with a vengeance and with it, more and more live events.
dkarl 1 hours ago [-]
Application design is still a challenge. I had Monday off and vibe-coded up an app that I've been wanting to use for years. The thing is, I can tell it's going to be challenging to make it something sticky that I actually use.
Which makes sense. The reason I wanted to make this app is that there are two very popular paid apps in the same category that I use every day that don't quite feel the way I want them to. It'll be easy to fix the little annoyances and missing features, but there's a feeling that's missing from them as well. I don't think it's wrong to say that I'm put off by a lack of taste, at least according to my taste. I don't know if I can do better, but I'm looking forward to trying, and I love that Claude makes me fast enough that the project has finally tipped from "I'd love to tackle this, but I know it's too big for me" (which is what I've been thinking for the last 5-10 years) to "I can make a credible attempt at this."
alansaber 48 minutes ago [-]
Implementation is generally the road to discovering that your UX sucks (and hopefully why).
PaulHoule 29 minutes ago [-]
I get exhausted very quickly reading stuff about AI by people who think there is some secret language of prompts or some better model or better framework which will make them successful at developing things.
I'm left with the same feeling I have when I read blogs by celebrity managers and developers like DHH or Spolsky or Graham or Atwood or Yegge, they talk as if you could learn something transferable from their experiences except... you can't. Their opinions about spaces or tabs or whether you should use static or dynamic languages are as good as anybody else's but not better!
The difference is that those guys actually made something and sold it, whereas the vibe coder almost made something.
People who make something significant with AI are going to do it because of all the others skills and attributes they have: good taste, domain knowledge, modeling, knowing what good code looks like, knowing what good user interfaces feel like, etc.
That's why I am not doomscrolling X to see what celebrity vibe coders say they are doing right now.
SoftTalker 14 minutes ago [-]
By that logic why is anyone here on HN? What good is reading about anyone else's experiences, they are as good as anyone else's but not better.
I still tend to go by the advice I read when I was just out of school: If you want to be successful, find someone who is successful, and do what they do.
I've grabbed the archive link for anyone with it struggling to load. It's a single replica running with fairly modest settings on my office server so I'm proud it's managed to live so far even with some load time, but will scale up before my next blog post.
roywiggins 2 hours ago [-]
Here's another thing: I think spending too much time with generative AI makes your taste worse, by habituating you to stuff that's pretty bad.
I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.
It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!
Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
> You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation, and because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output
Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.
Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?
(Also, this website when Show HNs with slop READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese.)
2 hours ago [-]
raincole 2 hours ago [-]
> READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese
Or you know, it's just not that important whether the README is written by Claude or not.
Generally speaking people don't use a service/library for the author's ability to write excellent proses.
benrbray 1 hours ago [-]
Presentation matters. Good documentation is evidence of a library that has been carefully thought through. Slop in the readme suggests slop in the code.
roywiggins 1 hours ago [-]
From my point of view, if I wanted an AI summary of a project I could generate one myself. An unlabeled AI readme is almost worse than nothing! I've generated AI readmes myself- they can be useful- but they aren't something to show off.
I'll read a badly-formatted readme written by a human with far more interest than a formulaic LLM summary of a project. But it seems like nobody even notices a readme is slop because it has nice Markdown, and my best guess as to why is that people have become habituated to this stuff.
add-sub-mul-div 2 hours ago [-]
In this case the point is that they accompany the new flood of low-effort self-promoted shovelware vibecode projects.
devinprater 1 hours ago [-]
Lol last night, on a forked and accessible version of Termux I vibecoded into existence, on an Emacs and Emacspeak vibejiggered to work on Termux, I vibecoded, with gptel-agent, an Emacspeak package to make it speak when tool calls are being asked for by the model, and automatically speak any explanatory text after all the tools are called and edits are made. All on my phone with a Bluetooth keyboard. It's so easy, even a blind man can do it! :)
And because it's all controlled by me, I can tell it how to have the package speak, what it should ignore, and I'm not stuck with whatever some sighted person at some big company thinks a blind person wants. Everything should at most be open source, and at least be hackable.
All that to say, AI has helped me out a ton. Now I can be as productive as Emacs, and a Linux terminal, and maybe one day a Linux GUI with real Firefox and such, allows. And it would have *never* happened without AI.
So let's please do continue bringing on the AI. Make it smart and local, so I can have continuous AI descriptions right on my phone, with the ability to screen share or even agent-control my phone to get around inaccessible apps. Oh and fix AI app accessibility so the app sends output to screen readers when I type to it cause I hate talking to my phone and not every blind person wants to speak all the time. Ugh I hate that stereotype.
amarant 18 minutes ago [-]
"The only problem is, no one needs their dream application"
I vibe coded my dream application, and I use it. I wouldn't really say I _need_ a pixel art editor for Android, but I sure do like it!
Do I really need more than that? Am I not allowed to create my dream app, for me? Nobody needs my pixel art either, honestly I kinda suck at drawing, but I enjoy doing it!
Op needs to get off their high horse and stop shiting on people for making things. Go make something and stop whining
athrowaway3z 44 minutes ago [-]
I've seen this played out 3 times with none devs i know personally. Somebody had an idea, starts vibing and feeling like they're making insane progress and cool stuff, but what can most generously be summarized as: a big Meh.
> Most of all, there is now an illusion of a lower barrier to entry.
Arguably, there has never been a higher barrier to entry.
The benefits accrue to the skilled. We all got X% more powerful, and those who were already skilled to begin with get a proportionally better outcome.
postalcoder 2 hours ago [-]
Hmmmm, where on the taste scale would you put making text unreadable when selected?
raddan 1 hours ago [-]
It's funny that you say that because my course websites for my students both:
1) make it difficult to select or copy text,
2) and even if you manage it, you discover that the actual text in the webpage source is encrypted,
mainly so they don't vibe-code their homework assignments. So I guess it rates high on my taste scale.
(kidding of course; but you can always bring your own stylesheet to the party)
Xirdus 51 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how well this works for you, considering screenshots are a thing.
ianbutler 1 hours ago [-]
Mmmm I can see the text just fine when selecting it, I realize this is subjective to me though and an accessibility thing I likely missed, I'll look into a better color scheme for that on the blog, sorry for the trouble.
postalcoder 32 minutes ago [-]
It would be nice if you fixed it but it was more of a friendly poke than a jab. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
gjvc 1 hours ago [-]
next to dark blue text on a black background
retrac98 1 hours ago [-]
The site seems to be falling over. Is that a skill or taste issue?
ianbutler 1 hours ago [-]
It appears to still be up? It's also running on the server in my office lol
selridge 1 hours ago [-]
So it’s taste now, eh?
The last redoubt of the old world.
altmanaltman 2 hours ago [-]
Kind of meaningless if you let "taste" be a vaguely-defined term. Like, what do you mean by "taste"? How is it a differentiator? Does Apple have taste? Is the reason one open source app is better than the other because the devs of the first one have more "taste"?
Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you better have that taste, aaight?" paradigm which is dangerously close to just common sense.
gopalv 1 hours ago [-]
> Like, what do you mean by "taste"?
Imagine the scene from Ratatouille, where Remy explains "taste" and the brother finds it impossible to understand what it is ("Food is food").
The dad goes from being annoyed that Remy is a picky eater instead decides to put him to work as a taster. Gives him the job of approving forage that comes into the family & protect others from being poisoned.
The reason we say "taste" is because that's the closest parallel.
When it is even more vague, I call it a "code smell".
altmanaltman 36 minutes ago [-]
Okay but you can define what good food is, right? Like if you're the best chef in the world, you can clearly define what "taste" of a particular food is the best. It might be subjective but it wouldn't be vague, the chef can clearly pinpoint what makes the food taste better instead of just being like "its what you feel" or other vague terms. My point is that the article doesn't delve into what is good taste in the context of coding. I understand the metaphysical meaning of what taste means but you need to define what it means in your particular context. If you leave it to be subjective, then everyone has good taste which means taste cannot be the difference between good and bad software which is the premise of the post.
kmijyiyxfbklao 58 minutes ago [-]
It's purposefully undefined because it's a social concept, not an engineering one. And it's also subjective. You can tell because they use OpenClaw as an example of a tasteful project. I would put OpenClaw in the same category as memecoins in terms of taste. Obviously crypto can be way more harmful, but in terms of taste both are on the "internet meme" category, as helpful as OpenClaw can be.
bandrami 1 hours ago [-]
Taste is a key concept in aesthetics and has had some great thinkers write about it. There's always some tension on whether taste can be taught, but I think the broad consensus is that it can but it's hard to do.
selridge 35 minutes ago [-]
The only book worth reading about taste is Distinction. Lots of people have written about it but most spin their wheels pretending class and upbringing are not involved.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
"Others like it" could be one definition. "I like it" can be another. Personally, it kind of differs depending on what I'm doing, what exactly it means.
altmanaltman 28 minutes ago [-]
Okay but what does it mean in the context of coding or software? Like if someone claims good taste is the differentiator fod good and bad in software, they should have some basic objective ways to measure it right? If its just vibes we're going with then everyone has subjective taste and everyone's app is good. Overall I still think its meaningless/lazy to talk about vague terms as guiding principles or key differentiators.
gtowey 2 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, "if it doesn't make sense to me personally, it clearly can't exist"
altmanaltman 33 minutes ago [-]
More like "I don't understand what you're talking about."
James_K 1 hours ago [-]
Skill is your ability to achieve your objectives, taste is the ability to differentiate good from bad objectives.
altmanaltman 31 minutes ago [-]
Okay but how does taste let you do that? I get what skill means but what is it that lets you differentiate between good and bad objectively? Is it experience? exposure? or just having good design skills? The article would be better if it went into the crux of this issue instead of hand waving it over.
BoredPositron 2 hours ago [-]
Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.
ryandrake 1 hours ago [-]
It's kind of useless if it can't be defined. Let's say I'm a software developer, and my product is criticized for "lacking taste." What can I possibly do to correct this, if we can't even agree on a definition? Let alone agree on what actions can be taken to "add taste" to the product.
dec0dedab0de 1 hours ago [-]
If you don't have any taste, you could work with someone who does have taste to do the interface design. Or you could copy popular patterns and designs, but that might lead to a worse experience if you copy the wrong things, or try to bend your project to fit a popular design that doesn't quite fit.
If you like it the way it is, then guess what, you do have taste, tell them to fuck off and just keep it the way it is.
The difficult part is being honest with yourself about why you like it the way it is. If you do honestly like it for what it is, then others probably will too, no one is really that unique. If you like it because you put a lot of effort into it, then you're just letting your emotions lie to you.
raddan 1 hours ago [-]
While in general engineers should define things, so that we can be clear about what we mean, there are plenty of things that are difficult to define that way. Love, happiness, satisfaction, for instance. You might argue "well those are emotions so they don't count" but you don't need to go far to find some more. What is the "perception of red"? What is the sensation of temperature (thermoception) or my sensation of my body in space (priprioception)? The sensations of these things are difficult to define--even if we have good explanations for how the physical world induces them--but they are experienced nearly universally by humans and we most people don't feel the need to define them to find them to be useful ideas.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
> It's kind of useless if it can't be defined
That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :)
Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK.
If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback.
ianbutler 1 hours ago [-]
I'd argue its not definable globally, but within whatever niches you're a part of it probably is. The reason I didn't try to define it when I wrote this is because the question stands good taste "to whom".
So like you definitely probably can get pointers from people in your specific niche and if you've been in that niche long enough you've probably developed some level of taste and feeling for what people in that group like and need.
1 hours ago [-]
51 minutes ago [-]
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
This blog post is on point, but it's somewhat interesting to see developers realizing that taste matters. That's fundamentally the idea behind product management as a role within a company, to be an arbiter of taste and to understand customers and the problem space so thoroughly that you have the right feel for things. Taste is often the most important element of product-market fit. Realizing that the vibe app you built doesn't have a need to exists is all about finding a failure of product-market fit.
There's a whole lot of people wrestling with something that is the core purpose of an entire career that is often derided as being useless, and folks are realizing maybe it's the only thing that will matter in the future.
brador 1 hours ago [-]
If only we had some kind of voting system that could uplift the good stuff...one can only dream...
mlapeter 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure if you'd consider this a counterpoint or just proving your point, but in the sea of AI slop there's also a real chance for people to create things that they couldn't before - my 7 year old is now able to nerd out and create games using claude even though he's just barely learned to read: https://www.kidhubb.com/play/meteor-dodge-solarscout64
It's not the prettiest but he's able to iterate on it and basically build whatever he can imagine just using claude on his ipad with voice transcription.
oytis 2 hours ago [-]
But... why? How is prompting an LLM "nerding out"? Before it was "it's not the prettiest, but the kid did it himself", which is cool and educational and just cute. Now it's "it's not the prettiest, and also the kid didn't really do it". Why? Just what for?
mlapeter 1 hours ago [-]
Why did people used to make geocities pages back in the day? Kids like to express themselves and being able to make simple games and share them with friends is fun for them. So far it's helping him learn to read (he reads and edits his voice transcriptions before submitting), and teaching him basics like bugs, game mechanics, etc. He iterates on it and adds/ removes things. He probably did several dozen iterations over 2-3 hours.
Posting it publicly is also helping him learn about people - we talked about how no matter what some percent of people won't like it and may even say it's stupid, but that will always happen and it's still worth creating things anyway.
ianbutler 1 hours ago [-]
When I wrote this blog post, something like this was in my mind as the type of scenario where I view it as a net positive. I don't have a problem with people building things they want for themselves, the problem starts when people try to share something to the rest of us without having understood why anyone would want to see it first.
I am extremely excited that your kid is able to do this, and even you sharing it now here isn't like "my child's game is the best game ever look at me" it's thoughtful commentary on the post I've written.
Even if you had shared a separate post on HN proper like "LLMs are enabling my child to build earlier and become involved in tech" or something that would have had thought behind it on why its interesting to other people, in considering other people you're acting in good faith.
My overall point isn't that LLMs generating apps are bad it's that we should consider why what I'm showing to someone else would matter to them in the first place, which you did here :)
Bjartr 1 hours ago [-]
This is such an awesome example. That it's good enough at getting a gun game to put a smile on my face is icing on the cake. I've played lots of simple flash games in my day and this seven year old's vision made real by an AI is better than a decent number of those.
Which isn't diminishing the authors of that prior work either, those same individuals with these new tools would have been able to do more too.
Bjartr 1 hours ago [-]
This is such an awesome example. That it's good enough at getting a gun game to put a smile on my face is icing on the cake. I've played lots of simple flash games in my day and this seven year old's vision made real by an AI is better than a decent number of those.
ForHackernews 2 hours ago [-]
But will he learn to read?
mlapeter 1 hours ago [-]
It's actually helping him learn to read quite a bit - after voice transcription, he reads the post and edits any errors by tapping on the word and changing it. He's been on the cusp of reading on his own and it's the first thing that motivates him enough to do it naturally.
OrangePilled 1 hours ago [-]
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cjonas 2 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cjonas 1 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cjonas 1 hours ago [-]
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).
mjr00 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cjonas 1 hours ago [-]
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?
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
> 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 1 hours ago [-]
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
andsoitis 2 hours ago [-]
How do you define taste (rough is fine)?
markbao 2 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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").
Rendered at 18:16:21 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Taste is subjective. Having 1 million todo apps, great. Maybe someone I know will find one they like and tell me about it. Maybe I'll find one that doesn't suck. Maybe I'll just make my own.
One thing I won't do though, is complain about how there's now 1 million todo apps that aren't up to my standards. Everyone being able to make their own apps however they want is a beautiful thing.
If I spend twenty years subsisting solely on a high sodium cup-of-noodle diet, get severely impaired under the influence of everclear while trying to use a straight edge razor for the first time, hang up a white canvas, and spin around like a whirling dervish yard sprinkler and then display this finished piece next to Jan van Eyck’s The Last Judgement - we’ve long since left the realm of pure subjectivity.
I'm being silly but I've always thought that the "taste is subjective" argument is not very compelling. Taste, if not entirely objective, at least can be measured in demographic thermoclines.
Okay, but so what? "Taste is subjective" is meant to defend the existence of some thing. "Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist (or shouldn't be the way it is)." Are you therefore saying the opposite? "Because most people don't like it, it shouldn't exist"?
I find that a convenient UI becomes the most important aspect of some applications (to-do list, alarm clocks etc). Getting it to be exactly the way I like it is a benefit by itself.
I've been thinking of making a note taking app for my phone as well. The 10 or so that I've used all have had issues that made me not like them for one reason or another. Eg 16k char limit per note, no searching inside a note, broken bullet lists, long startup time etc.
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like (good) taste to me!
Like you mentioned, ofc nobody wants ugliness.
But "good taste" in software can mean things that are not just decoration. And presentation is not irrelevant because it is our interface to any software.
It's far more than "frontend" or even "how things look like".
Words like "user story" are made from grains of truth!
Seems to be what the essay implies.
It’s super easy to talk about who has taste or not in the abstract. A lot harder to tell someone straight up they have no taste because of some idea you have.
No. Silence is better than noise.
The people I have a problem with are the ones who have neither but nonetheless find their ways into positions of power and influence where they proceed to make everyone else’s lives varying degrees of miserable.
OTOH I have huge respect for anyone who makes their thing for their own satisfaction.
Is there nothing? Great, go ahead and fill the void.
Is there so much that it becomes overwhelming to even look? If so, ask yourself: does your thing have any significant differentiators? Are you willing to maintain it? Do you want the people who come after you to see one more option in the sea, or an existing project made better thanks to your changes?
It's about respecting the time of one another. If I'm looking for a to-do app, I'm looking for a good one, at least in the ways that matter to me. Not for thousands of applications with the same exact issues. And so are you. Nobody needs a million of options that suck. We all want a handful or ideally one that does the job.
It took less than 90 minutes using claude code, I have a testflight I've shared with friends for feedback, and I'll probably put it out there for a dollar once I add a couple more settings.
The built in UIs, syncing, and integrations are really good. It took me a while to realize I didn't need another todo list app, just to tweak the built-ins.
Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).
Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.
Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.
I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.
When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.
Yes, you should do discovery, but that alone is not sufficient to develop taste. Being an also-ran is low taste even if you religiously meet the market expectations by following a pattern. Just like in fashion, you need to understand the rules to know when its okay to break the rules so that you appear fashion-forward, that is a form of taste no differently.
I think that's fine.
What I really think is that most of the logical folks here think we ought to be focusing our attention and organizing to maximize the efficiency of app making, and that vibe-coding really blows that up, because there is no way to know what is quality and what is trash without actually having to do the work and figure that out. That does suck, but it's why creators should have blogs, github/bitbucket accounts, etc, to offer up their credibility to facilitate bona fides.
I think the programming industry is going to become a lot more like the indie game industry, where loose networks based on mutual respect start forming and critics review the newest apps, because you really don't want to waste a bunch actually using all the stuff.
It's inefficient, but that's life.
At the time I was very much craving feedback and validation but I wanted honest validation, I knew some of what I was making was really good and some of what I was making was crap -- I wanted validation from people who could tell the difference, not from people for whom it was all the same.
Who knows maybe the old, scattered, personable, decentralised internet will come back - things like MySpace, geocities, sites like this (a lost art): https://www.cameronsworld.net/
Also taste comes from your ability to steer a model instead of having it steer you. e.g. a model suggests a basic pill button, you push back and curse it for its blandness and use it to design something new and novel.
One of the first uses I discovered was to have it identify my own blandness. I'll give it a general scenario from my writing and ask it for ten resolutions to that scenario. If my own resolution appears, I realize at best my resolution is bland and at worst cliche.
I then wait a few days, and then use a couple of systems (embeddings, deBERTa, etc.) to rank comments by novelty against the LLM-produced replies.
Seeing how predatory these companies are in their scraping and then continuing to publish where they can scrape is the absolute height of stupidity
Would also result in fewer sites with ads -- yay!
Which makes sense. The reason I wanted to make this app is that there are two very popular paid apps in the same category that I use every day that don't quite feel the way I want them to. It'll be easy to fix the little annoyances and missing features, but there's a feeling that's missing from them as well. I don't think it's wrong to say that I'm put off by a lack of taste, at least according to my taste. I don't know if I can do better, but I'm looking forward to trying, and I love that Claude makes me fast enough that the project has finally tipped from "I'd love to tackle this, but I know it's too big for me" (which is what I've been thinking for the last 5-10 years) to "I can make a credible attempt at this."
I'm left with the same feeling I have when I read blogs by celebrity managers and developers like DHH or Spolsky or Graham or Atwood or Yegge, they talk as if you could learn something transferable from their experiences except... you can't. Their opinions about spaces or tabs or whether you should use static or dynamic languages are as good as anybody else's but not better!
The difference is that those guys actually made something and sold it, whereas the vibe coder almost made something.
People who make something significant with AI are going to do it because of all the others skills and attributes they have: good taste, domain knowledge, modeling, knowing what good code looks like, knowing what good user interfaces feel like, etc.
That's why I am not doomscrolling X to see what celebrity vibe coders say they are doing right now.
I still tend to go by the advice I read when I was just out of school: If you want to be successful, find someone who is successful, and do what they do.
I've grabbed the archive link for anyone with it struggling to load. It's a single replica running with fairly modest settings on my office server so I'm proud it's managed to live so far even with some load time, but will scale up before my next blog post.
I think it's a sort of slot machine effect, you get used to losing and when something goes slightly well you wildly overestimate how good it is. You see this with visual artists who got way too into image generation. Because they have to spin the wheel a thousand times to get one good output, they have totally habituated themselves to a lower standard by the time they emerge from the AI mines clutching their one good output, because that output is not all that great.
It looks good compared to all the failed generations though!
Also, spending all your time cranking the slot machine handle and occasionally winning convinces your brain that you have a magic ability at cranking the slot machine handle, when actually you were at best slightly lucky. So you get people who convince themselves they are geniuses at using AI when they are actually average or slightly above average.
Is this actually true? I know of no artists nor programmers who used to have strict requirements, careful eyes and "good taste" who after playing around with AI suddenly dropped those things, that'd be very against basically their personality.
Do you have any concrete and practical examples of any currently public artists you've seen be affected by this?
https://www.decodingeverything.com/darren-aronofsky-ai-slop-...
(Also, this website when Show HNs with slop READMEs get to the front page and nobody seems to notice that it's written in grating Claudese.)
Or you know, it's just not that important whether the README is written by Claude or not.
Generally speaking people don't use a service/library for the author's ability to write excellent proses.
I'll read a badly-formatted readme written by a human with far more interest than a formulaic LLM summary of a project. But it seems like nobody even notices a readme is slop because it has nice Markdown, and my best guess as to why is that people have become habituated to this stuff.
And because it's all controlled by me, I can tell it how to have the package speak, what it should ignore, and I'm not stuck with whatever some sighted person at some big company thinks a blind person wants. Everything should at most be open source, and at least be hackable.
All that to say, AI has helped me out a ton. Now I can be as productive as Emacs, and a Linux terminal, and maybe one day a Linux GUI with real Firefox and such, allows. And it would have *never* happened without AI.
So let's please do continue bringing on the AI. Make it smart and local, so I can have continuous AI descriptions right on my phone, with the ability to screen share or even agent-control my phone to get around inaccessible apps. Oh and fix AI app accessibility so the app sends output to screen readers when I type to it cause I hate talking to my phone and not every blind person wants to speak all the time. Ugh I hate that stereotype.
I vibe coded my dream application, and I use it. I wouldn't really say I _need_ a pixel art editor for Android, but I sure do like it!
Do I really need more than that? Am I not allowed to create my dream app, for me? Nobody needs my pixel art either, honestly I kinda suck at drawing, but I enjoy doing it!
Op needs to get off their high horse and stop shiting on people for making things. Go make something and stop whining
> Most of all, there is now an illusion of a lower barrier to entry.
Arguably, there has never been a higher barrier to entry.
The benefits accrue to the skilled. We all got X% more powerful, and those who were already skilled to begin with get a proportionally better outcome.
1) make it difficult to select or copy text, 2) and even if you manage it, you discover that the actual text in the webpage source is encrypted,
mainly so they don't vibe-code their homework assignments. So I guess it rates high on my taste scale.
(kidding of course; but you can always bring your own stylesheet to the party)
The last redoubt of the old world.
Seems like a philosophical article, but rather than exploring it deeply, it kind of just abandons it at the "hey man, everyone can create apps, so you better have that taste, aaight?" paradigm which is dangerously close to just common sense.
Imagine the scene from Ratatouille, where Remy explains "taste" and the brother finds it impossible to understand what it is ("Food is food").
The dad goes from being annoyed that Remy is a picky eater instead decides to put him to work as a taster. Gives him the job of approving forage that comes into the family & protect others from being poisoned.
The reason we say "taste" is because that's the closest parallel.
When it is even more vague, I call it a "code smell".
If you like it the way it is, then guess what, you do have taste, tell them to fuck off and just keep it the way it is.
The difficult part is being honest with yourself about why you like it the way it is. If you do honestly like it for what it is, then others probably will too, no one is really that unique. If you like it because you put a lot of effort into it, then you're just letting your emotions lie to you.
That's just the programmer/logician in you screaming "unknown feeling!" :)
Programming (for me at least) is as much of a creative endeavor as it's one of logic. You can train yourself to at least recognize "good" from "bad", even though it's much harder to teach yourself how to go from "blank" to "good", or even being able to actually define why something is better than another thing. Sometimes it's literally just "vibes" and that's OK.
If you're unable to train this feeling in yourself, maybe the best course of action is to find someone you can tell is able to better use that particular skill, and ask for their feedback.
So like you definitely probably can get pointers from people in your specific niche and if you've been in that niche long enough you've probably developed some level of taste and feeling for what people in that group like and need.
There's a whole lot of people wrestling with something that is the core purpose of an entire career that is often derided as being useless, and folks are realizing maybe it's the only thing that will matter in the future.
It's not the prettiest but he's able to iterate on it and basically build whatever he can imagine just using claude on his ipad with voice transcription.
Posting it publicly is also helping him learn about people - we talked about how no matter what some percent of people won't like it and may even say it's stupid, but that will always happen and it's still worth creating things anyway.
I am extremely excited that your kid is able to do this, and even you sharing it now here isn't like "my child's game is the best game ever look at me" it's thoughtful commentary on the post I've written.
Even if you had shared a separate post on HN proper like "LLMs are enabling my child to build earlier and become involved in tech" or something that would have had thought behind it on why its interesting to other people, in considering other people you're acting in good faith.
My overall point isn't that LLMs generating apps are bad it's that we should consider why what I'm showing to someone else would matter to them in the first place, which you did here :)
Which isn't diminishing the authors of that prior work either, those same individuals with these new tools would have been able to do more too.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Hope your right! I imagine the truth will fall somewhere in between our difference in opinion
Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.
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.