Your AI Has No Taste

It knows everything. It sounds like no one.

Alex Finnemore · Goose Group · Claude Code Berlin

Good Software Is All About Judgment

Taste Is Structured Judgment

Think design system, but for AI judgment. Brand DNA that every tool in your stack can read.

  TASTE PACKAGE
  ├── philosophy      what you believe
  ├── constraints     what's actually true
  ├── behavior        how you communicate
  ├── examples        good output / bad output
  ├── mythos          the origin story
  ├── skills          repeatable tasks with instructions
  ├── context         knowledge base — docs, decisions, references
  └── chain           who you inherit from

Not a prompt. A persistent, composable, machine-readable profile.

An MCP Server That Loads Taste Automatically

I built smaak — an MCP server for Claude Code.

When I open a project, Claude already knows: how this client communicates, what words they never use, what good output looks like.

  // .mcp.json — that's the whole setup
  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "smaak": {
        "command": "npx smaak-mcp",
        "env": { "SMAAK_API_KEY": "..." }
      }
    }
  }

Taste Inherits

My agency has a taste package. My clients live inside it.

  goose-group                    ← how I think and build
  └── goose-group.pickle-company ← how this client works

The client package adds their philosophy, their constraints, their voice. My design judgment flows through automatically.

When I get sharper, every project gets sharper.

New client? Fork the parent. Start with everything I know, add what makes them different.

The Agency Layer: How I Think and Build

This is my taste package. It loads on every project I touch.

  philosophy:
    "Boring is good. PostgreSQL over the database of the week."
    "Optimize for 'debuggable at 2am by one person.'"
    "Understand before recommending."

  behavior:
    "Lead with the point. End with action."
    "Direct but not blunt. Acknowledge, then assert."

  skills:
    conduct-discovery    → run a client conversation
    evaluate-opportunity → should we take this work?
    scope-innovation     → demo → POC → production pipeline
    write-in-voice       → write as Goose Group
    create-deck          → build a presentation (like this one)

  never use:
    "unlock" · "synergy" · "scalable solutions" · "leverage"

The Client Layer: Pickle Company

Refrigerated pickle brand. 10,000+ retail doors. Inherits everything above, then adds:

  philosophy:
    "Authenticity is the moat. AI must amplify
     human touch, never replace it."

  behavior:
    "Empathize first, explain second,
     offer solution third."

  constraints:
    tone:    warm, personal, first-person "I"
    humor:   light pickle puns welcome, never forced
    never:   corporate jargon, "Dear valued customer"

Claude reads this before writing a single line of code or copy. Every tool in the project inherits it.

The Client Shapes the Product Without Writing Code

The Pickle Company founder doesn't open Claude Code. But his judgment is in every build.

He refines the taste package — adds examples of good responses, flags bad ones, updates constraints. That feeds directly into the software I build for him.

Taste is the interface between people who know what they want and people who build things.

Taste Is a New Ingredient in Software

Encode it once. Every session, every tool, every teammate gets it.

smaak.ai

Alex Finnemore · alex@goosegroup.co · goosegroup.co