> Like, what do you mean by "taste"?

Imagine the scene from Ratatouille, where Remy explains "taste" and the brother finds it impossible to understand what it is ("Food is food").

The dad goes from being annoyed that Remy is a picky eater instead decides to put him to work as a taster. Gives him the job of approving forage that comes into the family & protect others from being poisoned.

The reason we say "taste" is because that's the closest parallel.

When it is even more vague, I call it a "code smell".

I'd say taste-as-subjective-something is largely irrelevant. If something "looks good" but hurts to use, that's not much help. If it looks like ass, but is a delight to use, that's not good either (because most people won't reach the point of actually experiencing it). So you need "looks good" and you need "actually delightful to use". Taste seems to be orthogonal to both of those. Or perhaps (two kinds of?) taste is involved in each one.

At which point we define taste as two unrelated things: skill in aesthetics, and skill in ux.

I've seen apps that looked amazing (Taste #1, aesthetics) but made me go, "Okay, did they actually try using this thing?" (Taste #2, usability). I think these tastes are completely orthogonal, from personal experience. I think the vast majority of designers suffer from Total Usability Taste Blindness.

(And, though it feels a bit mean to point out, the vast majority of FOSS suffers from a total absence of both. The winning projects only win because they have no competition, they're the only free option available.)

Taste is a key concept in aesthetics and has had some great thinkers write about it. There's always some tension on whether taste can be taught, but I think the broad consensus is that it can but it's hard to do.

It's purposefully undefined because it's a social concept, not an engineering one. And it's also subjective. You can tell because they use OpenClaw as an example of a tasteful project. I would put OpenClaw in the same category as memecoins in terms of taste. Obviously crypto can be way more harmful, but in terms of taste both are on the "internet meme" category, as helpful as OpenClaw can be.

"Others like it" could be one definition. "I like it" can be another. Personally, it kind of differs depending on what I'm doing, what exactly it means.

Ah yes, "if it doesn't make sense to me personally, it clearly can't exist"

Skill is your ability to achieve your objectives, taste is the ability to differentiate good from bad objectives.

Taste is not something you can define as factotum it changes over time, over location and culture.