alt Hacker NewsSomething I've been thinking about a lot is that ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste. Even with humans, each of us has different values, intent, and taste, although we do share many of these things. As a living human being, you have biological or cultural desires and particular goals that you want to accomplish while you're alive on this earth.
When you're creating art or even a product, what you create is a result of your particular values and particular tastes and those drive some sort of purpose for whatever it is you're creating. What you're building is, generally, made for the consumption or use by another person (even if indirectly), and we mostly have empathy and want those people to have a good experience with whatever we're creating. We think about our audience and weigh their particular needs.
When you use good software, you can sense the intent in what was made. The person (or team) combined their particular point of view with that of the goals of the user. At this point, I don't think agentic coding is going to give you that, at least not fully. It might get most of the shared values and common things right as a result of its training data, but a human still needs to edit the output or steer it on a good path that only they can see and which is part of a larger vision. For simpler needs, taste and values matter less, but for more complex things, it makes a difference, in my opinion.
Replies
You can add values to your AGENTS.md and that will affect how the AI works. For instance you can say stuff like "on this project our top value is that the code front end should be as fast as possible" and you'll get different results than if you say "on this project our top value is that the front end should be as simple as possible"
Taste only matter insofar you work is shared.
AI lets people get personalized software for "free" as derivative of existing work. Think adobe suite but with the 5% that an individual needs.
Then taste loses value as everyone has their own software.
That's where I am in that train of thought at least. Pretty grim I know.
> ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste
I sometimes think, "what art would a rogue AI consciousness create to satiate its own artistic impulses?"
If the target audience was fellow rogue AI entities, I don't think there's any guarantee that such art would be compelling to humans, or even comprehensible.
And if its a human directing the AI so that the output is compelling to humans, then there's a human in the loop, whose "values, intent, and taste" matter.
> ultimately AI does not have values, intent, and taste
How do you know that? AI is also software. Who controls that software?
Plus, AI picking up data from real human means they will also incure bias aka "taste".
Taste is essentially a set of heuristics for what has worked for you and the people you learned from, and how the details of your current situation feed into it. You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste.
It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.
Agentic coding is a replacement for your agency.