As an engineer, you need taste. You need to be able to figure out what makes what you build provide a beautiful UX.
LLMs today can do a lot for you – code, organize, laundry etc. During times like these, you need to have taste. Taste, to direct the LLM to build something that has a great UX and DX.
By default, an LLM can do many things right and yet get to a point where the user wouldn’t like the feel of it.
An LLM is only as good as the person instructing it. That doesn’t mean that you are as good as the LLM or the LLM is similar to you. It just means that if you say the LLM is bad at generating code, it’s because you didn’t guide it well enough. If you are a good engineer, you’d be able to guide it well and get the output you need.
So, when you get into the world of context-driven development, you still need to be a good engineer. You can’t expect the LLM to generate good code while you’re a bad engineer yourself. You still need to be good in order for the LLM to generate good code.
I’ve seen many good engineers, but very few with good taste. Taste is what it all boils down to. A good engineer with taste can be a great engineer.
Linus Torvalds talks about Taste in the world of software engineering. He’s a huge proponent of this. Not just him, the very good engineers of the world are all the ones with Fantastic Taste™.
Someone could be fantastic at writing code and still lack taste. That’d make them a good programmer.
Good Programmer + Fantastic Taste = Fantastic Engineer
With LLMs helping out with coding, above average programmers can seem like Good Programmers just based on the output of their work. But they’d never look like Fantastic Engineers. For that to happen, Taste is all you need.