alt Hacker NewsNot everyone has this, but I always felt that a significant percentage of the value I bring is in immediately recognizing what you shouldn’t do.
I have a hard enough time explaining why “yet another bespoke application on some unmanaged azure resources” is a bad idea when they have more reasonable alternatives at hand.
Now these goofs can (very nearly) press a button and do it anyway, with no comprehension of the consequences. It’s high fives and pats on the back, until I’m cleaning up the mess.
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This lands. Llms are bad precisely at following what not to do. They work best off of positive constraints.
I have a design principles + tech preferences doc I force llms "lint" their approach against. It's not perfect but it helps. I call it a bias field, pushes them toward hopefully the happy and harmonious (with the rest of the system) paths. Obviously this is only partial and imperfect enforcement, but if it's applied to everything consistently it naturally encodes some self-consistency and harmony.
Yes, there is a post that made the rounds not long ago entitled Taste Is All That's Left: https://notashelf.dev/posts/taste-is-all-thats-left
Knowing what not to do has always been important, but it is perhaps more important than ever.