品味是最后剩下的东西

#Taste Is All That's Left

Published August 6, 202616 min read Source

thoughtsprogrammingsoftware

Table of Contents

Post Mortem

Hey. I’ve been kindly informed that this post has hit the frontpage of Hacker News, and combing through the comments I have been shown that this post reads of as what I would describe as, well, AI slop. If this is a concern of yours, please honor me with a quick glance at the post-mortem section below. Thanks!

For most of the time I have been writing software—which, compared to some of my readers, is not that long—I have come to believe that the hard thing was making the thing exist at all. This is not necessarily a new belief of mine. I started through the difficult and tedious experience of building web applications and watching them crash and burn.

You had an idea, and between the idea and the working program stood hours— sometimes weeks—of typing, of reading manuals, of misunderstanding an API and slowly grinding the wrong version into a slightly less wrong one. Production was the wall. Everyone hit it. It was the thing that separated the people who could from the people who could only talk about it.

That wall is gone. Or rather, it has been rented out. 1 You can describe a thing now and receive a plausible version of it much faster than you could have typed the first function by hand. The idea-to-artifact distance, the one that defined the entire craft, has collapsed to almost nothing.

Though, you have not been warned about one little thing: the value you built by learning to climb that wall does not disappear. It simply… moves.

The Bar Went Somewhere

We keep asking whether the machines are any good. Even yesterday I had a rather short discussion on whether they are reliable. While we have concluded that they are “reliably unreliable,” I think it is the wrong question. The output is good enough, generally anyway, and that is the problem—most of it, at least. Good enough is a solvent. It dissolves the reason to do better. For as long as making things was expensive, the expense did quiet work on our behalf. It rationed output. It meant that anything which existed had, at minimum, survived the cost of being made. You know what I mean? Effort was a filter, and like all filters it was invisible until it was removed. Nobody shipped a thousand mediocre variations of a feature, because a thousand mediocre variations cost a thousand times as much as one. The economics enforced a floor.

That floor is now gone. And when the floor goes, the thing that decides what is worth keeping is no longer the cost of making it. It is you. Your judgement. The verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function and know, somehow, that two of them are wrong. That verdict has a name we are slightly embarrassed to use in engineering circles, because it sounds soft and unfalsifiable and vaguely aristocratic.

Taste.

What Taste Actually Is

I want to be careful here, because “taste” is doing a lot of work and it is easy to hear it as decoration. A matter of preferences. Whether you like your braces on the same line.

That is not what I mean.

Robert Pirsig spent an entire book circling a word he refused to define, because he had convinced himself that defining it would kill it. He called it Quality. His argument, roughly, was that you recognise Quality before you can explain it— that the recognition comes first and the reasons arrive later, if they arrive at all. A good mechanic knows the engine is wrong before he knows why. A good editor feels the sentence sag before she can name the clause that failed. 2

Taste is that. It is the compressed, wordless verdict you reach faster than you can justify. It is partially 3 the “no, again” you say to yourself with total conviction and no available argument. And it is not soft at all. It is the hardest thing in the work, because it is the only part that was never mechanical to begin with.

Everything downstream of the verdict—the typing, the syntax, the wiring of one library to another—was always, in principle, automatable. We just had not gotten around to it. The verdict was the thing the machine could not do for you.

It still cannot. It can only make the absence of it cheaper to ignore.

Taste Is Downstream of Friction

Here is the uncomfortable mechanism, the part I would rather not think about.

Where did your taste come from?

No really. Where did it come from, was it genetic? Were you abducted by aliens one day that forcefully injected your sense of taste into your mind and wiped your memory?

I’ll tell you this much: it’s not from consuming good work. You cannot read a hundred excellent programs and absorb the judgement by osmosis, any more than you can become a chef by eating in good restaurants. Taste is built the slow, stupid, humiliating way: you make something bad, you are forced to live with it, it fails in front of you, and some part of you files the failure away. Then you do it again. The palate is an accretion of your own mistakes, sat with long enough to sting.

The friction was not an obstacle to developing taste. The friction was the curriculum. Every wall I cursed while climbing it was, without my noticing, teaching me which walls were worth climbing. The cost that rationed my output also educated my judgement, because paying the cost over and over is how you learn what is worth paying for.

So watch what happens when you remove the friction for the next person.

They can generate fluently from the first day. They will never ship the bad version and be forced to sit in it, because the tool offers them a competent version for free. They will climb no wall, and so they will learn nothing from the climb. They will arrive at fluency having skipped the entire apprenticeship that fluency used to require—and they will be more productive than I was at their stage, by every metric anyone bothers to measure.

They will be able to make anything, and unable to tell (or stop to think) whether they should. Not necessarily through any fault of their own. We removed the part of the process that would have taught them, and we called it progress, and by most definitions it was.

The Economics Are Against You

Suppose you have taste. Suppose you paid the full price and you can feel the sag in the sentence and the wrongness in the function.

Congratulations! You now ship at exactly the same speed as the person who cannot.

This is the quiet cruelty of the situation and I do not have a comforting way to phrase it. Taste is slow. It says “no, again.” It sends the plausible thing back because plausible is not the same as right, and while it is doing that, the person without it has already shipped, closed the ticket, and moved on. The market timed you both with the same stopwatch and it did not see the difference. It cannot see the difference. Taste does not show up in the diff.

It is unmeasurable, uncreditable, and invisible on a dashboard. You cannot point to the disasters it prevented, because prevented disasters leave no trace. You carry a cost—the extra hours, the returned work, the refusal to ship the fine thing when the right thing is still reachable—and you carry it alone, against an incentive gradient that runs the other way.

Harry Frankfurt once drew a careful line between the liar and the bullshitter. The liar at least respects the truth enough to work against it. The bullshitter does not care about the truth in either direction; he is simply indifferent to it. 4 Slop is the bullshit of engineering. It is not wrong, exactly. It is indifferent. It works, it passes, it is fine. And fine, produced without friction and shipped without judgement, is now the most abundant substance in the field.

The Flood