Taste

Cassia Scheffer

27 Jul 2025 — 1 min read

I can see really high-skill, high-taste shops like 37signals struggling to adopt [agentic coding] because their very good taste means they are repelled by the slop. Bigger companies and small startups/indies will have an easier time at it, out of necessity.
– Nate Berkopec on LinkedIn

With LLMs making leetcode and other whiteboard problems trivial, software hiring IMO should shift towards establishing taste, which LLMs absolutely do not have.

“What do you hate about ActiveRecord? What would you change about Rails if you could?” Review this PR, etc.
– Nate Berkopec on LinkedIn

What is “taste”? Does your taste matter as a developer? Do your customers care about ActiveRecord? (Spoiler alert: they do not).

I have been working in an exclusively agentic workflow for about six months now. I hardly write code. Does this mean I have poor taste?

I remember in my early days in software development, I overheard two opinionated Senior Developers argue about white space and wondered why it mattered.

Taste Does Not Matter, Customers Matter

What matters at the end of the day in any business is its customers. Do they like what you’ve made? Will they tell people about it?

You can’t run a business on opinions about ActiveRecord, Rails, whitespace, or any of that. You run a business by selling a product that works well and makes people happy.

But `insert thing here` is BAD!?

It might be! What do we mean by “bad”? What is the impact on our ability to deliver a reliable product? How does it impact our customers?

“Taste” is only important if it affects the customer. Here are the interview questions I’d use in this new world:

How does ActiveRecord affect the software development life cycle?
What impact can the ORM have on the quality of your application?
When do you choose to set your opinions aside and ship quickly vs weighing your opinions against real-world consequences?
How do you measure the quality of good software?

The answers to questions like this will inform technical decisions and will avoid banter about taste.

I’d much rather focus on building great things than getting mired in debates about ORMs.

Conclusion

I care about your views on building fast, reliable software that makes people happy. Let’s leave the bikeshedding to others

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