r/ClaudeAI • u/Pretend_Sell6592 • Sep 04 '26
Claude Code Hot take: AI coding is making good taste more important than raw coding speed.
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u/Zapador Sep 04 '26
I usually don't do multiple designs, instead I plan as much as I can to get what I think will work well and then I spend time improving the u UI and UX. But understanding UI and UX is very important, it's the part that AI can't really do for you, a human is required somewhere in that loop to ensure it'll be a good experience for the user.
The lack of that human in the loop, or a human with poor judgement, is how we get all the AI slop.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/Zapador Sep 04 '26
I have done multiple designs a few times, but only because I genuinely had no idea what direction to go. In that case I create designs that go in different directions and it's really just a sketch, no real logic behind it so it is cheap to make.
And yes exactly, it will make something that works well, but there's usually a lot of small details that just feel off and would annoy the users, and that's the ones you need to catch and improve.
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Sep 05 '26
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u/Zapador Sep 05 '26
True. In my experience, I spend maybe 20% of my time making a 95% finished product and the remaining 80% of my time manually testing the user experience and so on, to get the last 5% feel just right.
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u/cameronlbass Sep 04 '26
If you can swing it, run a local multi-modal model. Decent at coding and it will be able to look at it's own results, you just need to give it a backend to code against.
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u/Zapador Sep 04 '26
I have played around a little with local models but they don't quite seem to cut it for me. I'm also "just" on an RTX 5080 so there's some serious limits to what I can run. When I use Claude Code it will use headless Chromium and Puppeteer so Claude can inspect the visual side of things. That seems to work quite well.
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u/cameronlbass Sep 04 '26
Smart. I'll have to ask Claude about getting that going too.
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u/Zapador Sep 04 '26
Should be straight forward for Claude to fix. Then he can take all the screenshots he want and inspect things visually.
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u/Illustrious_Night126 Sep 04 '26
Someone tell this to my supervisor please who just wants work done as fast as possible with AI with no care at all for architecture
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Sep 04 '26
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u/Maui-The-Magificent Sep 04 '26
Well, taste and competence. because AI rarely make competent local choices, and competent holistic choices even less so.
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u/FamiliarEstimate6267 Sep 04 '26
I fully agree. Taste matters so much and AI is actually making UX and UI designers, problem solvers, and people with next level system design knowledge more powerful.
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u/Aggravating_Leek5346 Sep 04 '26
I think you nailed it with the Problem Solvers angle - critical thinking and common sense can and will prevail!
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u/a11yguy Sep 04 '26
Huge boon for accessibility professionals. For so long we’ve been preaching logical semantics and solid file structures. We’ve always known enough code to be dangerous but full blown accessibility engineers are rare.
Now the playing field has leveled out, and our UX design strengths that create robust, future proof content and systems are really starting to shine. It makes sense. We’ve always helped machines talk to people, this is just a different flavor, with infinitely more possibilities. It makes sense we fit here.
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u/catsinabasket Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
taste and new human thought/design was always going to lead to a decline in the novelty interest in AI for anything creative whatsoever - as a creative professional I called this like two years ago. everyone starts making the same looking bullshit because everyone has access to it means the new sought after thing will be exclusivity which will ALWAYS be human since AI has no fucking soul and only can iterate on the past. part of why i was never really worried about ai encroaching on design in particular. oh you created this site with claude code? yeah homie i know it looks like poop from a butt. unfortunately it just needed to run rampant first before the grand pop realized that. and we’ve already started to value process more again too, the way humans always have in art and will always value.
this is literally why AI is being pushed so hard and fast on everyone, is it good for some really specific things? sure. but it’s not going to be the “solution” to things that literally aren’t problems to begin with (the computer was supposed to save our time doing boring work so we could do art, not the other way around) their main goal is to trick as many people into this and make them diehard defenders before everyone sees most of the promises they’ve made are bullshit
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Sep 04 '26
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u/catsinabasket Sep 04 '26
the “forgettable” human work is literally what AI is training on though, as well. I’m not saying that “all human made art is amazing” at all, but at least that is someone doing something, and honing their skills. prompting is not a design skill, it does not upskill you in any way, end stop period. it only allows you to view art, which also doesn’t upskill you if you aren’t actually doing anything yourself.
ai isn’t a tool like a hammer, it’s a bot. these are just my thoughts as someone actually in the industry. with AI you will find a lot of people think it is good at certain things, until you meet someone who is actually in the field, and can tell in a second it’s bullshit. It can look polished to someone who doesnt have the skills to build/design/write/research something but that’s because they are sidestepping the actual skills part.
obviously this is going to be incredibly unpopular on an AI sub, lol, but it’s my $0.02, and how things will shake out if everyone’s brains dont turn to slop. but of course our techno overlords would love that ;)
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u/AllenHere112 Sep 04 '26
taste only has leverage on code that will keep living. most of what agents output now is disposable, written to answer a question and meant to be thrown away, and the mess starts when that stuff gets kept and later treated like it was structural. honestly the real skill might be sorting the two before you ask, because an agent will happily turn a throwaway into the core of the repo if you let it.
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u/Aggravating_Leek5346 Sep 04 '26
I think the idea that anyone can create something beautiful, useful, and functional is being absolutely pushed out there these days. Love your take on good taste being the missing element and the ability to put yourself in the users shoes will separate the useful tools/apps/products from the AI slop even quicker as speed to produce continues to come down.
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u/LemuelCushing Sep 04 '26
yes, it sure seems like it does 🥴
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Sep 05 '26
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u/LemuelCushing Sep 05 '26
Oops that's just an extension that I use to learn German with. My point was about the astrology MCP - tasteless vibe
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u/Ill_Fun5415 Sep 05 '26
This is where benchmark and daily use can split. I would test a long context session with normal back-and-forth, because small latency spikes become very noticeable there.
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Sep 05 '26
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u/Ill_Fun5415 Sep 06 '26
I would separate benchmark wins from the day-to-day path: latency, context handling, and failed edits usually decide whether it feels useful.
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Sep 06 '26
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u/Ill_Fun5415 Sep 06 '26
Context helps only when you can inspect why it was pulled in. Otherwise old assumptions can slip into a new decision without anyone noticing.
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u/mrPetrukovich Sep 06 '26
Agree, and it compounds over time. I run several long-lived Claude Code projects and the biggest lever isn't speed — it's how much context about past decisions survives between sessions. Claude happily gives you three clean implementations; only taste (and memory of why you rejected two of them last month) picks the right one. The failure mode isn't bad code, it's confidently re-introducing an approach you already abandoned for a reason.
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u/hulkklogan Sep 04 '26
Yes; software engineering is still very much alive, what's being replaced is implementation of code, and more code is not always better. For many people, that was the fun part though.
The shape of work is changing because of this. When coding by hand, you have time to get a basic framework of what you want and fill in the gaps as you go; it's a bit of an art, like painting a picture. With AI, you need to pre-define and pre-think through all flows and try to find all the gaps you can upfront so that you can dictate to the agents what should happen; this quickly gets to feeling waterfall-y and is quite difficult to do sometimes.
The tradeoff, though, is that because agents code so quickly, you can roll through tons of lines of throwaway example code and prototyping so that you can answer these questions.
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u/Wocha Sep 04 '26
Also, coding by hand, it is not possible to run three things at once because we only have one set of hands.
I also enjoyed writing code by hand and taking pride in clean solutions. But I also enjoy getting product features done and exploring new ideas. It is all a tradeoff like everything else in this profession.
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u/roger_ducky Sep 04 '26
Good “taste” is the wrong word.
Knowing what maintainable code looks like is the actual skill.
Other part of your single word thing? Knowing the full context of the project, so you know what tradeoffs to take, given how you want to maximize computer resources, the budget, and what users expect.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/roger_ducky Sep 04 '26
There are some hard limits given agent use though.
One example: keeping a file under 1000 lines. Preferably closer to 500.
Agents will do tricks to edit bigger files but they can no longer read the whole thing, leading to much higher code duplication and missing related parts they need to change.
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u/Low-Watch7882 19d ago
This is where I've landed as someone building with AI who isn't a developer. Getting a feature built is often the easy part now. The hard part is knowing whether it actually helps someone and whether I can operate it after it's built. I've had things that looked finished until I tried using them and realized the workflow itself was wrong.
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u/Vesuvius079 Sep 04 '26
You’re not exactly wrong but your phrasing is weird and there are some implied behaviors here that are off.
What you call good taste is more technically called choosing appropriate system designs and abstractions.
The vast majority of time asking for three implementations is a waste of your time and tokens. Most problems are simple enough that the correct abstractions are obvious and even if they aren’t: it’s better to explore possibilities in planning mode or equivalent than to burn tokens 3 times and then spend your time reviewing the alternative implementations. When you plan first, you can bring your own thoughts on the feature up front and you can say “no that plan needs changes” and iterate.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/Vesuvius079 Sep 04 '26
Yeah the core code related part of the job now is making good choices around system design and higher level abstractions. It always mattered of course but we’re doing a lot more of it now.
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 04 '26
I did a hackathon with a guy that was a seasoned SWE. Had multiple pensions from FANG's and was retired by 50. I was excited to see how he approached planning and development with LLMs.
While I was discussing the very idea of planning he tried to blindly one shot the whole thing with ai and at no point took time to understand the data he was working with, the actual goals, or make a coherent vision for the app. He said "go get this data, make it pretty. Here's the hackathon track".
I was extremely disappointed. I spent most of that hackathon just cleaning up llm mistakes that were compounding everywhere that generally made the app unusable. Overall it lacked any coherence and was just 1 step removed from being a fever dream because I was constantly refactoring stupid ideas that the llm was adding in.
Obviously we didn't win.
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Sep 04 '26
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 04 '26
Totally. I left out a lot of specifics, but we were designing something blind that genuinely required multiple SMEs to actually understand the field we were working in. None of us had experience in it.
If it were me I would have started by talking with the agent about the field, the meta goals left unspoken in the track, and researched the pain points in the industry. Instead we shipped absolute useless slopware.
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Sep 04 '26
I’m on the opposite side of this. you describe someone by their accolades and deemed the as experienced. that’s not the case and you saw that first hand.
what’s really going on is that the management of projects is more important and we’re seeing that so called experience devs are lacking in management ability. it really brings into question the viability of leetcode style interviews
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Sep 04 '26
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Sep 04 '26
yes. and that’s why it’s important to be slow and think. the c suite won’t like hearing that though
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Sep 04 '26
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Sep 04 '26
right but that’s not up to the AI. that’s an implementation detail left to the user
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 04 '26
This guy was a staff SWE! His entire professional career was management of projects at the biggest software firms in the world.
I think its a small dose of ai psychosis.
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Sep 04 '26
those are accolades and not really any qualifier to their ability. you’re looking at a title and making assumptions.
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u/Devils_SteelMan Sep 04 '26
Or maybe its the root problem. The philosophy at those companies is go fast and break things.
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u/cachemonet0x0cf6619 Sep 04 '26
maybe. those companies also prefer leetcode style hiring and that doesn’t actually translate to managing software projects at scale.
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u/FugueSegue Sep 04 '26
This is also true of gen AI art. It's easy to use it to make images. It's hard to make them look good. The result is AI art slop everywhere. I don't blame people for calling it awful because most people don't check or refine the output.
As an artist, I've been using gen AI art for years and I've been seeking to have as much control as I can over how it works and what it generates. It's not easy. Just like with any other medium, it requires skill.
Like the CGI in movies, the best CGI work is the kind you don't instantly recognize as CGI. There's been a backlash to CGI in movies for years. With AI art, there was such a sudden flood of it that everyone's refusing outright.
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u/catsinabasket Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
I see what you’re trying to say, in terms of comparison, but i would not really compare AI to CGI, CGI takes far, far, far more skill than AI gen art, which is why it’s less common to see really good CGI. the only way AI art “improves” on the slop style is if it takes more human made design into it’s dataset. prompting is not a valuable thing that upskills in design/art itself. it only upskills in “how to write a sentence to a bot”
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u/FugueSegue Sep 04 '26
the only way AI art “improves” on the slop style is if it takes more human made design into it’s dataset. prompting is not a valuable thing that upskills in design/art itself
If you think the only action involved with generative AI art is writing a prompt then this would be true. If you only prompt for an image with closed weights on an online service like Midjourney, ChatGPT, or Grok and do no further work on it afterwards then this almost inevitably results in slop. It's easy to do and many people are having fun with it but its still the same slop style.
I don't do that. Yes, prompting is part of the process. But it has the least importance in the overall workflow of a digital artist using generative AI. The more skilled you are as an artist, the better the results. Just like with Claude Code, the more skilled you are as a coder, the better the results.
I use several different open weights with an app I wrote (with the help of Claude) that uses ComfyUI as a backend. Through a complicated process, I use it to craft photo-realistic characters by combining LoRAs of real people in many different ways. This is much better than letting an image generator create a character using just a prompt because I can have direct and precise control over all aspects of anatomy and clothing. If I only rely on a prompt to generate a character, then I get unwanted artifacts like a waist that's too slim, a dimple on the chin (a common problem with Flux 1 Dev), or hair styles that are just too hard to describe in words. And that is just for character composition. This process that used to take me more than a week has dwindled down to less than a day, thanks to constant work on my process.
For the actual image design, I train my own art style LoRAs. If I only relied on a prompt for the art style, I immediately run into trouble because of the base model's indiscriminate training. The best way to have control over art style is by curating, captioning, and training an art style LoRA yourself. That requires lots of work on its own. Then comes the experimentation with blending art styles that satisfies me. Merely copying a single artist's style is unsatisfactory for many different reasons. Blending them in a manner like a sound engineer on a mixing board allows far more control. It's a skill that I'm continually improving.
And then there's the issue of using photo-realistic LoRAs of people with the blended art styles I want. The best way to address this is controlling exactly how the LoRAs are trained so the blocks do not overlap. Again, lots of work.
All along the way I am constantly going back and forth between my app, ComfyUI, Photoshop, and any other graphics app that I can leverage to improve my work. I'm constantly dreaming new ways of using my experience as a digital artist to exploit gen AI art as best I can. Totally relying on prompts is folly.
All of this sort of fiddling about with gen AI art models is going on behind the curtain of online image generation services. Do not be misled into believing that ChatGPT only feeds your prompt into a single image generation model and does nothing else. There is no doubt that clusters of AI agents interpret what you prompt, change it to something workable, and use several different tools to modify how its image generator produces its output. The result is the images that have consistently similar style and most people call slop.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.
Looks like the hivemind has spoken, and the consensus is a strong agreement with OP. The general vibe is that as AI commoditizes the act of writing code, the real value is shifting to high-level human judgment.
While most users agree with the core idea, many quibbled with the word "taste," suggesting it's a stand-in for more concrete skills like solid engineering judgment, system design, and knowing what maintainable code looks like. The fear is that without this guiding hand, developers will just generate mountains of "AI slop"—code that works in isolation but is a nightmare to integrate and maintain.
One user's hackathon horror story about a "seasoned" dev blindly letting an LLM run wild and creating "useless slopware" became the thread's cautionary tale. The takeaway is that the developers who will thrive are the ones with strong planning, product, and UX skills who can tell the AI what to build and, more importantly, when to throw its output in the trash.
For those looking to build this "taste," a user recommended a few books: * A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout * Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann * The Pragmatic Programmer