You Can't Reverse Engineer Taste

When I was in college, I was at a bar with a friend and a Kings of Leon song came on. She said, “Oh my God, I hate that I love this song.”

I said something like, “Well, it’s pretty popular, so it must be pretty good.”

Man, she almost tore my head off.

Popularity had almost nothing to do with whether something was good to her. If anything, it worked against the song. Part of her taste was built around liking things that not a lot of other people liked.

You see this constantly in music, books, art, film, and even software. Some people love things precisely because they do not feel mass-market. Being a little strange, a little inaccessible, or a little difficult to explain at a dinner party is part of the appeal.

I had a friend who absolutely loved Primus. I have listened to Primus and I don’t get it. It just is not for me. But the people who love Primus really love Primus.

Then I saw Les Claypool play a solo show, and loved it. When I found out he was the bassist and frontman of Primus, I was blown away. Same musician, different context, different experience.

Good is not a clean, cut-and-dry thing you can define in a dashboard. It depends on the aesthetic, the context, and the audience. Sometimes it depends on how many other people already like the thing. Sometimes it depends on whether you encountered it at the right time, in the right room, with the right people.

Products work the same way. An interface that feels obvious to one audience can feel sterile to another. A tool that seems too strange for the mass market can be exactly right for a smaller group of people who have been waiting for someone to make it.

Everybody is talking about taste right now. In AI, product building, software, design, and whatever else we are all pretending to have figured out this week, it has become the final remaining human advantage. The thing the machine cannot do. The thing separating the person who can use AI from the person who can make something good with it.

But the conversation is a little too clean. We talk about taste as if it is a fixed trait. Some people have it. Some people do not. Some people were born with a better eye, a better ear, a better sense of what belongs where, and everyone else is stuck trying to reverse engineer it from mood boards, Twitter threads, and YouTube videos about building better products.

At AIE Miami, someone asked how you cultivate taste. One of the better answers was that you cultivate it by living life. Not by locking yourself in a room and obsessing over your specialty forever, but by doing almost anything else. Reading books. Listening to music. Going to brunch with friends. Traveling. Having conversations. Getting out into the world. Actually being a person.

It reminded me of a story Trevor Noah tells about meeting Chris Rock. Trevor told him he was doing comedy seven nights a week, and Chris basically said, “Wow, you are going to be terrible at comedy.”

Trevor didn’t understand. Isn’t that what you are supposed to do? Work harder? Do more reps? Get on stage every night?

Chris Rock’s point was that comedy comes from living. If comedy is all you do, you have no real material to work with. You may get better at being on stage, but then being on stage is all you have left to talk about. Sometimes you have to step away from the art to do a service to the art.

Software has the same trap. You still have to make things and get your reps in. But if you only stare at software, read about software, listen to software people talk about software, and then build software inspired by other software, your view of what is good becomes very narrow.

You become optimized for the opinions of people trapped inside the same room.

The audience can also arrive late. Van Gogh found little commercial success and remained largely unknown during his lifetime. Other artists admired his work, but the broad public acclaim came later.

The paintings did not change after he died. The audience did.

Sometimes people reject your work because it is bad. Sometimes it is just not for them. You may not have found the right audience, or you may be early. Plenty of ignored things are ignored because they are not good, but applause is still a shallow substitute for judgment.

Online, we look at what gets attention, what gets shared, what looks impressive, and what fits the current aesthetic, then try to move toward it. Chasing the appearance of good taste is one of the easiest ways to avoid developing your own.

Before the work leaves your hands, it still has to please you. You release it, people respond, and you learn from what happens. But the response cannot become the source of the work. If the imagined judgment of the internet is sitting on your shoulder from the beginning, you are not developing judgment. You are chasing approval. You’re learning to win popularity contests, not produce great work.

You have to make things you are proud of and sit with them long enough to know whether they feel right before the internet tells you what they are supposed to be. You cannot control how the work will be received. You can control whether you made the thing you meant to make.

Lately, I have caught myself consuming more than I was making.

Because of AI, I probably consume more examples of other people’s work than I ever have before. I am always looking at what everyone is doing: the tools they use, the workflows they build, how they use agents, how they think about loops, state machines, coding assistants, software factories, and all the other strange new machinery surrounding us.

Some of that is useful. You should know what is happening in the world. But at a certain point, I was reading too much, watching too much, and absorbing everyone else’s framing before I had spent enough time with my own.

So I decided to do the opposite.

I started working on my own workflow tool around loops, state machines, and software development. Instead of reading every blog post I could find and choosing the best open-source version of someone else’s idea, I decided to build my own from first principles.

Yes, I am still building it with AI. But I am not using AI to replace my sense of what the thing should be. I know the developer experience I am after. I know the feeling I want from the tool and the kinds of workflows it should support. I know what feels too heavy, too abstract, too clever, or like something I would never actually use.

The only way to learn any of that is to go slower, sit with the thing longer, and resist polluting the work with everyone else’s conclusions before I have reached my own.

The line between inspiration and pollution is thin. Consume too much before you make and you start inheriting other people’s assumptions. You see the problem through their categories. Their solution begins to look like the natural shape of the thing.

Then you never wander, and wandering is where a lot of the good stuff happens.

When you rebuild something from first principles without checking where everyone else has already been, you give yourself permission to get lost. You stumble into little problems. You make weird choices. You take the long way. You misunderstand something. You invent a worse version of an existing thing. And sometimes, along the way, you find one small idea that is yours.

There is no correct answer. You make something true, release it, and sometimes watch people misunderstand it. Your judgment has to survive that.

AI makes this harder even as it makes producing easier. It can write the code, generate the mockup, draft the copy, build the prototype, and polish the result until it looks more finished than it has any right to be. It can also pull you toward the average. It makes it easier to imitate what already exists, smoothing and polishing your work while quietly sanding off the part that made it yours.

Better prompts, more automation, and faster releases do nothing to protect your point of view. Live enough life that you have something to say. Build enough things to develop judgment. Consume enough to be literate, but not so much that you become derivative. Wander long enough to stumble into something you would not have found by following the map everyone else already made.

I still build products for other people. I want the work to land. I want people to use it, love it, tell their friends about it, and feel like somebody made the thing the right way. Making something for people can be generous. Making it by committee is how you end up with garbage nobody cares about. Not the committee, not the audience, and not even you.

I was wrong in that bar, but not for the reason my friend thought. Popularity does not make something good. Obscurity does not make it good either.

At some point, you have to stop borrowing answers, trust your own eye, and make the thing the way you see it.