Why the AI Era Demands Programmers with Real “Taste”

Hello, I’m Tony Bai.

If software engineering is likened to a factory, its most scarce resource for decades has been "productivity". With the rise of large models such as Claude and Claude Code, productivity is overflowing at unprecedented speed.

Even an inexperienced junior programmer who can write prompts can generate a complete front‑end, back‑end, and database system in minutes – the era where one person can out‑perform an entire team has arrived.

When coding becomes as cheap as drinking water and production is highly commodified, what core competitiveness remains for a software engineer?

Mitchell Hashimoto, co‑founder of HashiCorp, recently posted Defining Taste on X.

In that post he states the core soul‑question of software engineering in the AI era: In the future we no longer need a faster "typewriter"; we need captains with "taste".

What is a software engineer’s “taste”?

Most people associate "taste" with UI color schemes or visual design, but Mitchell argues that this view is overly narrow.

“Taste is the ability to make high‑quality qualitative judgments in the absence of objective metrics. It creates something that feels intuitively right, even if you cannot quantify it, yet you can experience it directly.”

For backend architects, operations experts, or low‑level developers, taste is everywhere.

Architecture and API Minimalism

HashiCorp’s toolchain (Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, etc.) became legendary in the cloud‑computing space because it embodies a restrained, elegant engineering taste. A good API is like a piece of art: it hides unnecessary low‑level details while striking a perfect balance between extensibility and usability – the intuition of “add one and it’s too heavy, remove one and it’s too thin.”

Pursuing Certainty and Extreme Compromise

Mitchell shares his experience developing the new project Ghostty. To achieve a perfect frame‑by‑frame animation on all Apple platforms, he abandoned cross‑platform SwiftUI and fought with native NSViews and CoreAnimation.

“Know when to compromise and when to fight for an extreme experience” – that is high‑level engineering taste.

The Art of Subtraction

A commenter on X added: “Taste often concerns what you decide not to put in.”

The original iPhone was great not just because it added iPod functionality, but because it boldly removed many cumbersome physical buttons from the Mac. In software, refusing to cram useless micro‑services into a system or writing over‑engineered “space‑flight” abstractions reflects a senior architect’s taste.

Taste is strangely hard to create but easy to copy. Once a tasteful design appears, mediocre developers can replicate it 1:1, leading many to mistakenly think taste has no value in an era of open source and zero copying cost.

AI Era: Why “Taste” Has Become Incredibly Expensive

In the past, being able to write code was a barrier; now AI has “inflated” that skill.

From Scarcity of Production to Scarcity of Judgment

Economic principle: when a production factor becomes abundant and cheap, value shifts to judgment.

Mitchell sharply notes: “The commoditization of production outpaces the commoditization of taste. The unresolved question is whether AI can ever generate ‘taste’. For now, qualitative judgment remains a human‑only privilege.”

When Claude can generate five different micro‑service architectures in a minute, you become a reviewer and decision‑maker. Without deep taste for good architecture, you’ll get lost among seemingly perfect AI‑generated code.

The “AI Slop Paradox”

A commenter coined the term “AI Slop Paradox”. Large models are high‑level statistical average generators trained on massive data. When everyone uses AI to write code, the system quickly converges to a soulless homogeneity.

AI can solve urgent problems, but it often produces bland, boundary‑less code stitched together to satisfy prompts – “slop”. Without a seasoned engineer with taste to vet, trim, and refactor, this AI‑generated code becomes the most terrifying technical debt for software companies over the next decade.

“AI is merely an amplifier. If you lack taste, AI will amplify mediocrity, producing endless variants of industrial waste.”

How to Defend Technical Dignity Against AI

Avoid the “Autopilot Trap” and Reclaim Code Ownership

Don’t become a prompt‑only “code verifier”. Many engineers report becoming lazy after using AI assistants, eventually being burned out by massive, incomprehensible AI code.

A tasteful programmer never hands over architectural control to machines. Use AI for boilerplate, but retain the steering wheel for data flow, module decoupling, and boundary isolation decisions.

Taste Stems from Obsessive Exploration of “Why”

In the AI era, getting “how” is easy via ChatGPT, but that makes you a worker. The only path to taste is to obsess over “why”. Read time‑tested open‑source projects (Linux Kernel, Redis, Nginx) and understand the trade‑offs their creators made. Taste is forged through such prolonged “weighing”.

Cross‑Disciplinary Inspiration

A commenter suggested: “The best way to improve taste is to look beyond tech, understand how the world works – faith, history, physics, art – and bring parts of that back into what you build.” The best architects often have strong humanities and cross‑domain thinking because software’s ultimate goal is to model and solve real human problems.

Conclusion

“As always, I declare that this article was handwritten without airplane Wi‑Fi.”

In an era flooded with AI‑generated content, a billionaire Silicon Valley legend chooses to type each word by hand, embodying the highest form of “taste”.