/AI3h ago

Expertise Shrinks To Taste As Self-Improving AI Agent Swarms Rise

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Susan Zhang@suchenzang#59inAI

it's kind of beautiful how every bit of alpha/expertise/skill

has been relegated to a small corner we now call "taste"

as if all value-production can be distilled down to simply a matter of "preference"

acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright

and not through any methodical step-by-step manual labor (doesn't scale, why bother?)

accelerate! climb the abstraction tree!

lest ye be drowned and trampled by the rising tide

of recursively self-improving agentic swarms

whipped up by vibes, restrained by vibes

all clamoring towards an infinite holy abundance

backstopped by a king

8:36 AM · Jun 6, 2026 · 6.2K Views
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Users reacted to the post on expertise reducing to taste via self-improving AI agent swarms by either praising it as beautiful and insightful or rejecting it as wishful thinking while questioning the models' coding skills.

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Chris Paxton@chris_j_paxton

@suchenzang I don't really this is true, as much as people seem to wish it were so.

Susan Zhang@suchenzang

it's kind of beautiful how every bit of alpha/expertise/skill

has been relegated to a small corner we now call "taste"

as if all value-production can be distilled down to simply a matter of "preference"

acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright

and not through any methodical step-by-step manual labor (doesn't scale, why bother?)

accelerate! climb the abstraction tree!

lest ye be drowned and trampled by the rising tide

of recursively self-improving agentic swarms

whipped up by vibes, restrained by vibes

all clamoring towards an infinite holy abundance

backstopped by a king

3hViews 638Likes 6Bookmarks 1
Walnut Ave Value@walnutavevalue

@suchenzang Beautiful.. Earned judgement can’t be “distilled” into something abstract.. it comes from doing rather than just knowing

2hViews 23Likes 2
Chris Offner@chrisoffner3d

@suchenzang Hm, I don’t think of taste as something “acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright.” Taste is intuition and intuition is distilled experience. Sometimes it’s learned by studying the experience of others, often it can be learned only from active experiments.

3hViews 40Likes 1
kron@0xkron

@suchenzang I like you posts very much ... people will see how wrong they were in most things as they alway are ... and the systematic minds will prevail once more

3hViews 71
Siladitya@xSiladitya

@suchenzang As an AI researcher yourself, do you believe the existential crisis rhetoric that frontier labs are pushing around the coming of AGI? At least with the current LLM architecture

3hViews 59
Ankit Maloo@ankit2119

@suchenzang The source essay by pg which presumably started the conversation talks about elegance in work product(and by extension who produces that has taste) as the primary driver. People kind of ignored that and just defaulted to people w taste.

2hViews 21
Anya@Anyavovaa

>acquired passively through judgement/critique, or via birthright

I dont think this is true at all, i think developing taste is very active process and there are many actionable things you can do. People think it’s passive / birthright because when done well it’s effortless/looks intuitive.

Source : Im an art curator

1hViews 18
Adam@aschiff19

@suchenzang Tech these days: I’m life-maxxing my life are you?

My Oura ring says I’m happier than you, my eightsleep mattress says I sleep better than you and I hit all my corporate OKRs- so I am better than u!

27mViews 8
Nikolai Yakovenko@ivan_bezdomny

@suchenzang Yeah. It’s pretty mad really.

Even for those of us who grew up playing chess, doing other competitions (all of which AI excels at)

I don’t know is Shakespeare is just a matter of “taste”

Then again the frontier LLMs can’t write “like Bloomberg” yet, given inf budget

1hViews 8
Deva@DevaBuilds

@suchenzang Taste is expertise that never got written into a benchmark. Which is why everyone claims it and nobody can audit it.

3hViews 7
Evi@geteviapp

@suchenzang No swarms at GDM, what you are talking about, your models can’t even code :)

2hViews 6
Chris Paxton@chris_j_paxton

@suchenzang Nah people talk about vibes and taste but it sure seems like the people who are winning actually do have skill on their side

1hViews 5
Ankit Maloo@ankit2119

@suchenzang more thoughts

2hViews 5
ShashanK🤺@shacrw_

@suchenzang @chris_j_paxton it's "skill.md issue" now

2hViews 4
Plebian@Plebian_2

@suchenzang Then taste is just preference of someone else's best practice.

Abstraction only kicks the concern downstairs - but the staircase is built on tradeoffs and compromises, all the way up.

The emperor wears no clothes. Eventually somebody is going to step in it.

2hViews 4
Susan Zhang@suchenzang

@chris_j_paxton you shall be stoned to death with chants of "skill issue".

3hViews 4
Cat Kisser@JerryLee2248

@suchenzang Your posting cadence is concerning. Everything ok, Susan?

2hViews 2
Swog@swogx

@suchenzang the cope was easier when we called it curation instead of taste

1h