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"

> 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.

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

I've found that telling agents to not do something mostly just gives them a suggestion of a way to do that thing, and the part about not doing it that way gets lost. Well, it's nicely accessible for when it apologizes for doing it.

I now try to only give examples of how I want it to do things, and hooks that complain when they do the bad thing (but still don't mention the bad thing in the complaint.)

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".

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.

That isn't more concise than

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

But it's more readable, and that's what matters.

I don't think more empty lines and useless whitespace is "more readable" at all. Once again, the "taste" argument comes back.

What makes it more readable is:

1. Not having two sets of syntax for the same idea, especially when if statements can trivially be extended to an expression.

2. Not adding the concept of an operator pair (? and :) to the grammar of the language, along with parsing rules, just for this one case

3. Not getting the precedence of this ?: operator pair completely wrong.

4. The conditions are at the same indentation level, each condition is preceded by the word "if" - it's obvious what it is when skimming the code.

5. The values too are at the same indentation level, making it obvious they play the same role in the code - rather than your snippet where the condition "baz" is directly under the value 1

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.."

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.

> everyone had the same jokes

I wonder? Surely total viewership across those few channels was less than an episode of Friends in the 90s.

And I'd bet people watched less television and engaged in other activities, maybe came up with some jokes of their own.

(Doesn't really have anything to do with your point, sorry)

I guess maybe it is like Agent Smith from the Matrix. Nothing particularly detestable about the individual, but what makes it distasteful is that same individual is in millions of places.

> 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.

I would argue that it has a collection of tastes and mixes and matches them with the same effect if you prepared a dish that is an amalgamation of recipes from ten different people. It is somewhat similar to what you want to make, it will fulfill your nutritional needs but boy does it not taste good. Our PR reviews and steering the agent is nothing but us adding different ingredients / herbs / spices until it is palatable.

> 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.

> 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".

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.

Most commercial software is maddeningly, infuriatingly, difficult to use. Everyone seems to want to reinvent basic interface elements. The "values" I get from most SaaS UI is "we're too special to use just the standard, normal, boring, UI controls, so I'm going to invent something new and then half-arse the implementation".

It's all ego and zero empathy for the user, who is left wondering how tf this gizmo works and trying to puzzle out what the designer was thinking.

And then, just when we'd learned the interface and got used to how it works, the inevitable rewrite. For no good reason; the new interface isn't "better" than the old one. It's just a new product manager pissing all over the thing to mark their territory.

I hope agentic coding isn't going to give us that.