Ask HN: Examples of AI taste?

1 points by SuboptimalEng 4 days ago | 2 comments

I've struggled to find a clear definition of what it means to have "taste" when working with AI, so I wanted to try to find examples.

Here's my example:

React.js was released in 2013 (before I started programming professionally, so I could be wrong about this). But taste is knowing that React is the "future" even when all the training data that AI would've had until at that point in time was with Angular, Backbone, jQuery, etc. So no AI would suggest React, purely because it's too new and not enough training data, right? But having "taste" is using React.js over what is recommended by AI?

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What does this imply? Is it possible, that if modern/good AI existed in 2013, we would've never used React.js because many folks would just "vibe" Angular or Backbone?

Is it possible the next best framework or language or tool already exists, but it will never get the light of day because it's not part of the AI training data?

smt88 4 days ago |

This isn’t true in my experience. AI will recommend new things, but it will caution you that it doesn’t have a big ecosystem.

If you prompt thoroughly (listing your priorities, values, and your own taste), then you’ll get better recommendations that don’t just regress to the mean.

dabinat 4 days ago |

Taste is relative - what’s tasteful to one person may be distasteful to another. It may differ among cultures too.

I think it’s wrong to say AI doesn’t have taste; it’s more accurate to say it doesn’t match your own taste and it can be hard to get it to match because it’s intangible.

This is more evident with Claude Design than Claude Code, where it does incredibly dull and uninspiring designs and then writes little puff pieces about how “bold” and “edgy” they are. For some situations that is the correct design, but I found it difficult to get better results with additional prompting.