Comment by jchw

It's easy to dismiss "taste" when you either have none or just fail to appreciate it, but nothing gives you an appreciation for the importance of taste like LLMs. There is no benchmark for taste, so while many things improve taste does not. Bad taste is, in fact, a huge component of what makes AI slop so sloppy.

But human coders can have bad taste too. There is code where there is nothing obviously objectively wrong, yet the choices feel like they were made by someone who just doesn't value or put emphasis on the right things, yet spends a lot of effort on trivialities. It comes in many forms.