Taste is just quality by instinct. At sufficient (and not all that long) timescales, a tasteless product will be more and more difficult to make work at all.

I think this is a complete misunderstanding of what people mean by taste in software engineering. Taste is more like the System 1 response one builds to code over time, which (ideally) captures the quality of the software beyond surface level, so things like maintainability, composability, readability, likelihood of hidden bugs. This is completely different from the question if the code fulfills the immediate task at hand, but also not the same as pure aesthetics.

I may be paid to build a machine, but I am a human and take pleasure in arbitrary acts of vanity. I value elegance, and will always favour elegant solutions in engineering and the design of machines, virtual or physical.

That’s the reason why I buy Apple products in private, because I value the design over the exorbitant prices they charge; and it’s the reason why I mull over code that’s already functional until it’s pleasing my ideas of elegance.

I can come up with all kinds of justifications and explanations why the code I’ve written a certain way is objectively better too - understandability matters to the next guy after all - but I won’t be ashamed for taking a certain pride in my work, even if nobody other than me ever values it. That’s fine.

When the LLMs finally take over coding altogether, you’ll have your raw, functional code. Won’t be long anymore. But for now, I’m a human, and I will do human things.

Most engineers are wrong (I obviously am the true arbiter of taste), but that doesn't mean there isn't better and worse code.

"Does it work" glosses over a bunch of things: is it fast, cheap, secure, reliable, easy to understand, easy to modify? And that's just for server software where you've nailed down all the functional requirements. Determining what the functional requirements is it's own question.

And all these other non-happy path requirements are somewhat in tension with each other, so what is ideal in one environment is not necessarily ideal in another.

And in particular, "easy to understand/modify" is truly subjective. Different people have different ideas of what easy to understand means. Even if we get to a world where AI is writing all our code, "easy to understand/modify for the AI" is still an important question. We've probably all seen prototypes that collapse under their own weight of slop by now.

As time passes we will have fewer and fewer literati