[cjonas]

There's been a lot of discussion around in the future how "taste" will be the only differentiation / moat (recently watched a good video about the gen-ai music industry), as everything will be trivially easy to recreate. But your vision and how well you execution it... and the nuance involved in getting every minor detail correct is much harder (and something the LLM is exactly average at). I recently experienced this while vibing the duckdb vscode extension "I always wanted". Code is 100% LLM generated, but I think I probably have well over 1000 turns of conversation at this point to make every detail exactly as I want it.

Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

I don't know where this leaves us, but it's going to be interesting/scary to live through what seems to be coming.

[embedding-shape]

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

Why is it easy to copy?

I too have written a tiny essay on this topic (https://emsh.cat/good-taste/) but I don't see how "taste" is easy to copy, at least I haven't been convinced by any of the arguments people chucked at me so far.

[cjonas]

Because it's easier to clone someone else's "good taste" by just mimic'ing their formula / ripping of their exact implementation of a feature/ui. The gap between "first to get it right" and "everyone else catches up" could become non-existent in software. You'd need to continuously innovate (I think to some degree, this has always been the case, but it's the tempo that has changing).

> Why is it easy to copy? I think music trends would be one historical example of this? With software it's a bit more concrete (I'll just make my app function EXACTLY like yours does) and there is less protection from the law, unless you manage to weasel your way into a patent.

[mjr00]

> Personally, it feels like taste only buys you time and taste is easy to copy.

No offense, but only someone without taste would say this ;)

Taste is not easy to copy. If that were true then there would be no bad major Hollywood movies in established genres; yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the formulaic superhero genre, we still get stinkers like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter.

If you actually try looking at places where people show off their taste--scrolling through the latest songs on Soundcloud being a great source--you realize that people just pump out terrible stuff without realizing it's terrible. This was true pre-AI, and AI it hasn't made it any less true.

It's similar to the transition from live instruments to the DAW in the music world. The DAW eliminated all physical training requirements for making music, and opened up massive new worlds for the types of music that could be made. The end result was a handful of great things amidst a sea of garbage.

[cjonas]

Just to be clear, I don't feel this is actually the case in world of music and art, at least as an individual consumer. I would argue the industry & economy rewards it though.

In software it feels different though. If you build an awesome app and want to charge for it, what stops me from just pointing "Claude Epic 2.5" at it and making a pixel perfect replica?

[andsoitis]

How do you define taste (rough is fine)?

[markbao]

An intuition for what people like.

Inherently subjective, but you can still approximate ‘more or less tasteful’ by how many people respond well to it.