Until models have taste, we still need Software Engineers to judge their output in the context of a broader goal. Not saying this will never happen, but we have yet to see evidence of models getting good at this. If anything, the lack of improvement on that axis has been quite underwhelming; the latest example of that being OpenAI offering a Lean proof of the solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations, but that proof not matching the natural language of that proof [1].
OK, but in my experience, ~90% of the software dev economy is CRUD and boilerplate. A very tiny percentage of the dev economy was ever doing anything novel, if you really think about it.
So, this is an interesting question. If "taste" still gives advantage for now, what does that do to the rest of the boilerplate dev economy, which I am still sure was >90% of the entire thing?
What does "taste" even mean? The only taste that matters is PMM taste. Coding is solved, unless you are doing something truly novel.
So, if we can discount 90% of the boilerplate devs, and the 10% can just use tokens.... I mean is anyone denying that we are doing this right now, and killing the entire jr dev ladder???
Am I still really having this conversation right now in 2026? Isn't all of this extremely obvious by now?
Technical ability != building something people want, will use on a daily basis, and provides economic value or enjoyment for humans. Models have been trained to be superhuman at the former, not the latter. Taste is what allows humans to do the latter.
Therefore, until taste can be programmed as a reward function in RL, or we have demonstrated that scaling RL improves model generalisation to such an extent that we don't need to create that reward function,
> Coding is solved, unless you are doing something truly novel.
Agreed. And even then, AI are sometimes better at humans at finding solutions to problems humans can't (e.g. Navier Stokes equations). But that still doesn't mean all tasks of the job are done (though obviously the definition of the job have and will continue changing as the tech improves).
I believe that we generally agree.
> Technical ability != building something people want, will use on a daily basis, and provides economic value or enjoyment for humans. Models have been trained to be superhuman at the former, not the latter. Taste is what allows humans to do the latter.
I think finally learned of the role title and the audiobook to teach me about this. It will also be replaced, but one of the last "tech" roles to be automated. It's where the taste lives, right?
Role: Product Marketing Manager - with a tech background and agentic dev skills (although the last part is most fleeting)
Book: Obviously Awesome
If anyone else would care to educate me about this here, please and thank you!