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Agent Taste

peter-steinberger's framing of the skill that survives the automation of code production. "If an AI can write the code, what is an engineer's job? Taste."

The lowest bar: AI-smell detection

The entry point of taste is the ability to instantly know something is AI-generated. Works across mediums:

  • UI/UX — "the purple gradient" / "the color border on the left"
  • Copy — too wordy, too many dots, inappropriate apologies, certain cadence
  • Code — generic naming, over-abstracted, telltale boilerplate
  • Architecture — wrong seams, awkward dependency directions

"Even if you can't pinpoint it, you will know. That's why I call it a smell."

This isn't a parlor trick. In an environment where 80% of output is agent-generated, AI-smell detection is the first line of quality defense.

Higher-order taste: the details agents won't produce

The next level: what the agent wouldn't produce unprompted, but makes the thing feel alive. Examples from OpenClaw:

  • Occasional roast messages when you run the CLI
  • Personality tuned for each chat platform (WhatsApp voice ≠ Slack voice ≠ Telegram voice)
  • The soul-md file — hand-crafted persona, not prompt-templated
  • Easter-eggs and lobster references

These emerge from prompting taste into the system design, not from asking the agent to "be fun."

Why it's the moat

  • Not benchmarkable → not optimizable → not commoditized.
  • Compounds with exposure: taste is pattern-recognition built from many examples across many domains.
  • Can't be outsourced — agents can execute taste you specify, but they can't originate it (yet).
  • See animals-vs-ghosts: ghosts inherit whatever's in the training data, which is the average, which is slop by construction.

Pairs with

  • System design — Peter: "If you don't think about that, you will eventually swipe yourself into a corner." alex-krentsel independently reaches the same conclusion from the systems side: see design-over-implementation — when the code is AI-written and gross-but-working, architectural taste is what's left.
  • Saying no — the ability to refuse the wild-idea-that's-a-prompt-away.
  • Big-picture syncing — the agent is dropped in blind; taste provides the context the agent can't infer.

Cross-references