On Taste.

In a world where you can generate apps and stories on a whim, taste is what remains. Taste in storytelling, in design, and in problems.

Taste does not (only) mean designing beautiful interfaces, or experiences. It's about being able to differentiate what is from what ought to be. Being able to tell what option helps push the status quo the most, right now.

Taste is subjective?

We all have fundamentally different tastes. One person might really like brutalist architecture, another might not.

Taste is also informed culturally. Different cultures have different values and belief systems. Differences that guide you as to which problems are to be solved immediately or can be delayed. Differences that guide UI and UX design¹.

Without taste, products will be ok. They either become part of mindless uniformity, same design, same ux; or are a random amalgamation of information. They converge against the least opinionated version of themselves, because that's what minimises training error in models.

We should never settle on products that are just ok. We should instead strive for greatness. Be willing to step on a few toes to see our vision for the future through. Something you can be proud of putting your name on. Something linearesque. This cannot be achieved by AI. It requires honing taste and diving deep into what makes humans tick. It requires making bold leaps and spurious connections of seemingly random data.

Cave, Reader

We should be absurdly bullish on AI. I want for it to replace as much as humanly possible. Today to use it for as much as I can -- writing code, summarising content, learning new languages, everything. But to live a tasteful life, everything of consequence must be designed by a human.

Honing Taste

Think of how you solve a Maths problem: You sit down, tinker with the problem. It might be a tough one, so you spend a lot of time on it. Maybe, just maybe, you take a glance at the solution because you just want to be done with it. And suddenly? Everything makes sense, the solution seems obvious. Sure, there might be some steps in there that are a bit difficult. But overall? You surely would've gotten to the same conclusion, and will definitely be able to solve the problem the next time. Next time you see a similar, but not identical problem? You struggle again. Not finding the right answer. Your brain has played a trick on you. Pretending to understand the pattern, without actually doing so. You didn't learn, you didn't build new connections. You only memorised.

To actually understand and learn Maths, you need to try different approaches to get to the right answer in the end. You need to sink your teeth into the problem. Fail on ten different ways of proving some random theorem. Only then will the patterns start to click and be apparent. Only then will you be able to generalise to new problems.

I believe the same applies to honing taste as well. To identify what is from what ought to be, we need to try. We need to tinker, to build, to think. To design ten bad interfaces, launch 5 different products. Each one might or will fail. But digging in, doing it yourself is the only way to learn. Not books, not theory, not AI. Just you.

TL;DR

We need to hold the brush ourselves, and guide our helpers to bring our vision to life. Today, that means writing yourself. Building the overall vision yourself. Sitting down and, without assistance, drawing outlines and pixels. Slowing down, so you can speed up and doing the fun part yourself.

Be tasteful.