I Don't Trust Tasteful People.

"Taste is more important than ever" might be the most distasteful thing to say right now.

It sounds like an "Agile Coaching Fundamentals" conference tagline.

It wants to be deep, but mostly virtue signals that someone has spent too much time around "tasteful" people.

I don't think I am one of them, since I have a high tolerance for distaste. Bad fonts do not offend me enough. Ugly user interfaces do not make me pissy. I can take a look at a giant pile of shit codebase and my first thought is: "does it work?"

It's quite inconvenient, tho. Everyone keeps framing taste as the final boss of the clanker end times. Machines can generate infinite competent looking things, so I guess taste is the last human moat?

Maybe, but I don't really know what taste is. I do notice stuff that feels fake. Like a sentence that is little too smart, or a landing page void of thought, or a Frankenstein's monster startup pitch made from corpses of other startup pitches.

I prefer sincerity. A sincere ugly thing is miles more interesting than a tasteful fake thing. At least the ugly sincere thing has a pulse. Maybe taste comes later, maybe it does not. But I trust pulse more than polish.