Taste as Infrastructure

A fluent answer can still be wrong for the work. It may miss the important detail, flatten a useful disagreement, or recommend something nobody in the room would choose.

By taste, we mean the judgment behind those choices: what good looks like, what matters more when two things conflict, and what we would refuse to ship. Experienced people carry much of it without having to explain it. Working through examples together helps make it available to someone else.

Make the judgment inspectable

A useful package brings together a point of view, constraints, examples, output standards, and ways of working. It should help someone distinguish a good answer from a merely plausible one. “Be thoughtful” does little. Showing why one recommendation understands the customer’s problem and another misses it gives people and tools something to work with.

Writing that down also makes disagreement possible. Whose standard is this? What did the examples leave out? Does the person doing the work recognize their judgment in it? A rule that cannot be challenged is a very efficient way to preserve a mistake.

Reuse includes revision

A written standard becomes useful infrastructure through use. We apply it to real work, examine what it gets right and wrong, and change it when the result teaches us something. The person receiving the answer needs a way to question it; confidence from the model is not a substitute for a reason.

This is what we are building with Smaak. The packages make a particular judgment available without pretending it has become universal. They should help people notice more, make better choices, and carry what they learn into the next piece of work.

Original illustration generated with AI for this belief.