A Software Developer's Taste
(Edited with Claude)
A few weeks ago, I saw someone on Reddit comment something along the lines of “If you think Claude Code is good, you’re a vibe coder.” The force of my eyes rolling into the back of my head almost killed me.
As I’ve consumed more content about AI-assisted tools, I’ve noticed “taste” mentioned as a differentiating quality between “good” and “bad” software developers. Within the professional software development world, there seems to be a taste stack:
- Problem Identification: Selecting the right problems and solutions to build
- Tools: Picking the right programming languages, tools, frameworks, etc. for building
- Logic Development: Building logic that is efficient, extensible and scalable
- Visual Design: Wrapping logic in a usable, design-forward interface
I struggle with how the word “taste” is being used, both because of its entanglement with economic constraints and how it creates an exclusionary binary of good vs. bad developers. Personally, taste is a tool for building an aesthetic, and an aesthetic holds beauty, a point of view. The word is almost a misnomer… it’s really “craftsmanship” that people are referring to.
As software development becomes more accessible, I’m curious if evaluation will move beyond the obvious and into the indescribable, the mysterious, the emotional. What would it mean for someone to say, “That’s a beautiful piece of software” and not refer to anything identifiable? In order to break into this domain, software developers will need to be thought of as creatives rather than engineers.
Food for thought:
- Lenny Rachitsky’s interviews with Anthropic’s Ben Mann and Cursor’s Michael Truell
- The Vibe Coding Paradox by Sangeet Paul Choudary
- Vibe Coding as a Software Engineer by Gergely Orosz
- A Survival Guide to a PhD by Andrej Karpathy
- How Vibe Coding Really Works by Alex Glushenkov
- Man Ray on craftsmanship and mystery
- Ira Glass on a creative’s taste