i wish there was a way to replay codex's computer use traces in fast forward mode. it's v hypnotic to see the cursor moving about, clicking, and doing things.
my hot take is that "taste is a uniquely human thing" is cope.
one simple example: i've noticed that friends of mine who are not designers at all (for example, backend / infra people) were making projects with ai 2 years ago that looked obviously sloppy.
now the same people are shipping things that look… pretty polished. probably good enough that a junior designer could pass it off as their own work.
and when i ask them what changed -- did you learn some design fundamentals? did your 'visual taste' improve? are you better at noticing bad spacing / typography / color hues?
most of the time the answer is just: the tools got better. the models got better.
i can only judge this for visual design / frontend because that’s where i feel like i have some taste. but i’m pretty sure the same thing is happening in copywriting, backend architecture, research ideas, product taste, etc.
yes, prompting matters. yes, having a good taste yourself still matters. but the median 'taste' of an ai model in 2023 and the median taste of an ai model in 2026 are very different.
there is a waterline of taste and it is rising very fast.
sloppification of the internet was a temporary phase.
i think opus-4.7 is a genius model -- and when the dust settles, it will be very obvious.
it's just the case of people evaluating the results on old harness optimized for older models.
the real AI eval isn't benchmarks
it's giving one identical twin to Claude and the other to ChatGPT and watching what happens to their lives
twin studies, but for LLMs.
watch what happens... t.co/Q6QZv0aXmI
@usgraphics how does it emerge from the bottom up? or like... are there good examples of bottom up emergence of top grade aesthetics?
i've always assumed it needs to be top down 🤔
it always surprises me how good codex is at git surgery
sometimes i give it a large exploratory branch, and ask it to make it production ready. and it extracts the vibecoded slop to manageable PRs, keeps the diffs reviewable, writes nice descriptions, handles merge conflicts gracefully, preserves the original intent, etc!
when i do multi agent shenanigans, and pipe some workflows to a new agent/team -- i love to tell the original agent(s) to "stand by"
i know it doesn't do anything, but it always gives me a nice feeling when i do that!
@phileisn sometimes it throws very weird curveballs at me.
"i pushed the commit. if you want, i can change the name of the branch to (something completely random) now" 😅