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Comment by m132 | Hacker News Reader

Most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.

Is there nothing? Great, go ahead and fill the void.

Is there so much that it becomes overwhelming to even look? If so, ask yourself: does your thing have any significant differentiators? Are you willing to maintain it? Do you want the people who come after you to see one more option in the sea, or an existing project made better thanks to your changes?

It's about respecting the time of one another. If I'm looking for a to-do app, I'm looking for a good one, at least in the ways that matter to me. Not for thousands of applications with the same exact issues. And so are you. Nobody needs a million of options that suck. We all want a handful or ideally one that does the job.

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Instead of using third party apps for a todo list, I recently wrote myself a utility - a background process to reschedule iOS Reminders I don't get to, make sure every reminder I create actually gets a scheduled date/time, and to deconflict reminders from calendar entries if I get an overlap.

It took less than 90 minutes using claude code, I have a testflight I've shared with friends for feedback, and I'll probably put it out there for a dollar once I add a couple more settings.

The built in UIs, syncing, and integrations are really good. It took me a while to realize I didn't need another todo list app, just to tweak the built-ins.

It's a fairly radical idea that AI can (and should!) be doing things invisibly with existing platforms and avoid the whole nightmare of UI development.

> does your thing have any significant differentiators?

When I see a Show HN around a very popular product concept (like a habit tracker), the first thing I search for is a FAQ or comparison table against other similar apps.

> The most of this mythical "taste", at least as hinted by the article, can be acquired rather easily—by looking into what's already out there before jumping to creating.

Yes, you should do discovery, but that alone is not sufficient to develop taste. Being an also-ran is low taste even if you religiously meet the market expectations by following a pattern. Just like in fashion, you need to understand the rules to know when its okay to break the rules so that you appear fashion-forward, that is a form of taste no differently.

Almost like the rules for taste are made up on the fly…

Of course they are, taste is a social conversation to align for a window of time on a set of guidelines. Taste is a social construct, being a social construct (or "made up") does not make it any less real or valuable.

It’s a social construct yeah, but constructed by what?

IMO most of the unpleasant truth about taste is that it is really a stalking horse for money and distinction (cf the book of the same title).

Taste isn’t a social construct, it’s a function of how your brain is structured/wired. How it’s applied is a social construct.

I disagree taste is a very real thing and there are multiple levels to taste from shallow and easily changed, to deep and relatively constant.

Shallow taste is stuff like popular trends that come and go, and hating the taste of beer until you’ve had it a few times (not saying everyone has to like beer, that’s not the point).

Deeper taste is more like your deeply held cognitive biases. Like a current of a river or the valleys cut into a mountain. It’s the shape of your cognition that determines how information flows through your brain.

Deeper taste is heavily connected to you and your identity. It’s part of who you are. I think most people would agree that parts of themselves change very slowly, and some not at all.

I know there are parts of me that feel the same as when I was a child. To deny the existence of taste is to deny the existence of a “you” that is different from others.

The problem is that people are often delusional and AI feeds these delusions. You have to switch to objective measures to gain skill and taste. This is true for art (ask: Where is the focal point) instead of "is this good or necessary"

There are long lists of successful programs that market themselves as little more than "like program X, but faster/distributed/higher resolution/bigger map"

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