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Comment by ListeningPie | Hacker News Reader

taste and judgment, which you can only obtain by having a strong CS base and coding manually for years.

I disagree, the definers of taste; art and food critics, movie and book reviewers, don’t need to have learned the craft by doing. Taste is a separate skill.

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No one seriously expects a food critic to be able to cook a Michelin-starred meal. The job of that kind of critic is to be insightful and entertaining, and it's very different to the taste required to create top quality food, which is a combination of solid technical skill and creative flair.

Taste in coding is a combination of insight, experience, native talent, technical skill, and flair. Tasteful coding produces clever but straightforward minimal elegant solutions that an average developer can't imagine but can adapt and maintain.

If critics were forced to be actually skilled at the craft of creation, the world would be infinitely better off. Both the cello and the player are better off by the cello maker also finally being the cello player. Alienation was a mistake and this part Marx of all people understood well.

This is why "critical thinking" is a meme. Being a critic takes no skill. I want far fewer critics and far more constructive thinking. GenAI being the ultimate constructor is a bonus.

I'd say taste is a consequence of lifestyle, which is learned by doing. And art critics often have bad lifestyle, which is visible in their bad taste. When art is virtual life, it would define a lifestyle, which is adopted by doing, in its turn producing taste.

Agreed.

Taste implicitly requires discipline of what one chooses to expose themself to and what not to.

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