Yesterday, I watched a youtube video with Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich talking about taste. In the video, Mark makes the insightful comment that taste is essentially experience. The interesting thing about this observation is that usually you think about “taste” as being a developed subjective opinion, but defining it as “experience” means that it’s less subjective and almost as if it’s not something you control.
I’ve had interesting work experiences where people I’ve historically disagreed with on design issues eventually reach a state over time where our differences in design/architecture preferences are fewer. It’s things like this that sort of make me wonder how much free will people have and how much of their taste is just taken from life experiences.
I remember the Lex Fridman podcast where he interviews Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw. At one of the points during the interview they discuss the differences in AI agent personalities. I remember when I first started to see Opus 4.5 or 4.6(?) showing taste in its work. I remember thinking that these AI labs really have the ability to cultivate a personality and taste through the experiences and evaluations that they train their agents through.
It will be interesting to see how these evolve over time–if we end up with only a handful of unique personalities or if there is a way to support a democratization/distribution of agents such that their unique experiences could meaningfully be incorporated into their AI DNA. Unless the economics change, I think we’ll stay on the path where the service providers only provide a couple of models. It may be up to the open and self-hosted models to release something that can adjust its own weights in the future.