Training The Palate For The Producer's Chair

A while back, I came upon a few clips from "60 Minutes" where American record producer Rick Rubin was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. In the interview, Rubin self-attests to having no technical abilities whatsoever. He states himself that he knows nothing about music!

I know what I like and what I don't like. I am decisive about what I like and what I don't like.

Cooper, quite reasonably, pressed him on it:

So what are you being paid for?

The confidence that I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel have proven helpful for artists.

Rick Rubin

An aside, if you are unfamiliar with Rick's work: Slayer, Tom Petty, System of a Down, Johnny Cash, Slipknot, Linkin Park, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The range is the point. I grew up listening to a good number of those records, all shaped by the same pair of ears, unbeknownst to me at the time of course. The full discography is a rabbit hole worth falling into.

Paid For Taste

So here is a man who, by his own cheerful admission, cannot play the instruments, cannot work the mixing desk and holds not a scrap of music theory, and who has nonetheless spent four decades handsomely paid to sit in a room and pronounce on what is good. Four decades of tasting other people's cooking, in effect, at the most rarefied table the industry can lay.

Watching him work is telling in itself: eyes closed, swaying, letting the melody and the rhythm move through him, and somewhere in all of that a verdict quietly forms, long before there are any words to hang on it.

Something measurable is happening in that stillness. The pleasure of music, it turns out, lives less in the sound than in the prediction. Your reward system quietly wagers on where a piece is headed and pays out when it lands somewhere better than you guessed, and the dopamine even arrives in the beat before the peak rather than on it. Rubin's ear is just decades of those wagers, settled so many times that the verdict shows up before the words do.

Elements of the documentary struck a chord and resonated with me and I found myself drawing parallels to what I see and experience within the tech industry today. But before we get there, it is worth asking a more basic question. What actually is taste?

Sweet Wine And Other Contrasts

Begin with the literal sort. Ask most people what wine they favour and a fair number will confess, a touch sheepishly, to a weakness for something sweet. Put that to a sommelier and you will be treated to the wince. Dry reds are meant to be the grown-up answer, all tannin and structure and hard-won appreciation, and sweetness is where one is presumed to have loitered before one knew better.

Except no one nursing the sweet glass is having a lesser evening for it. Their wine is every bit as vivid to them as the dry red is to the connoisseur doing the wincing.

Trained By Contrast

Taste, in the literal sense, is built out of contrast. Savoury means almost nothing until there is sweetness to lean against; salt to sharpen the caramel, acid to cut the fat, a note of bitterness to keep a dessert honest. And we are the luckiest generation ever to sit down to dinner, with chillies from one continent, citrus from another and some fermented oddity from a third all crowded onto the same supermarket shelf. Our palates are schooled by more of that collision than anyone before us, which is why "good taste" refuses to hold still long enough to be pinned to a wall. Each new contrast quietly re-teaches the palate that will judge the next one.

The neuroscience of it is stranger than the food metaphor lets on. Some of what we call taste is just handed to you at birth. The bitter-taste receptor gene TAS2R38 decides, with a couple of letters of DNA, whether coffee, kale and tonic water read as pleasantly bracing or frankly offensive.

Around a quarter of people are "super tasters" who feel bitterness far more intensely than the rest of us, and you will not talk them out of it. So the wine drinker reaching for something sweet might not be lazy or untrained at all. They could just be running different hardware.

But most of what we call taste never occurs on the tongue at all. The raw signals are assembled into flavour further up, in the orbitofrontal cortex, where taste and smell and texture and even the mere appearance of a thing are bound together by sheer repetition. And that region does not simply record a flavour, it appraises it, assigns it a worth. Pair a scent with a reward often enough and the neurons learn to anticipate the reward; withdraw the reward and, in time, they learn the new bargain instead. The apparatus that decides what you like, in other words, is engineered to be rewritten. Nobody issued you a palate. You have been cultivating one your whole life, every time you sit down to eat.

And the palate you school at dinner does not have the courtesy to stay at the table. The same faculty, forever appraising each new thing against everything it has already met, turns its attention to whatever you spend your days among.

Tasty Software Systems

For a good many of us, that turns out to be software. Now and then you cross paths with someone who simply has it: taste in design, or its near relation, a feel for standards and process and the unshowy excellence of a system built with care.

Apple is the obvious example, and obvious is exactly why it works. You can level all sorts of criticism at them, and plenty is fair, but pick up one of their devices and you feel it anyway. The weight sits right in the hand. The box opens with that slow, deliberate exhale of air, like it was engineered to make you wait half a second longer. None of that is an accident. It is the residue of thousands of small moments where somebody who trusted their own palate looked at a nearly-finished thing and said no, not yet. I still cannot bring myself to throw the packaging away, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit about a cardboard box.

Software betrays the same signature. A codebase whose naming is coherent, an API that reads as though a single mind presided over it, an interface with no discordant seams. Taste in a system is almost never perceived head-on, any more than you consciously admire the equilibrium of a well-composed dish. You simply register the absence of friction, the quiet, the merciful sense that nothing is clamouring for your attention.

The Producer's Chair

Chatting with a colleague of mine recently, he phrased something rather eloquently: "LLMs can only look backwards, never forwards."

Well, me being myself, I thought "huh", that is a rather profound statement... Neurological fireworks commence!

The models are trained on everything already made; they interpolate the past. Taste of their own they have none, only the aggregate taste of everyone at once, averaged into a smooth and agreeable nothing. What they furnish instead is speed, and speed unaccompanied is not the same as taste. Given time, it is your judgement that decides whether the output was worth anything. I dwell on this at greater length in this article.

And here is where it landed for me. With "teams" of agents now doing the making, the engineer's hands are coming off the instruments. We are shifting, whether we asked for it or not, into the "producer's" chair. Let's frame this as the "The Rubin role". You sit in the room while the band plays, you decide what is good, decisively, and you express it clearly enough that the band can act on it.

Software engineers need good taste. Arguably we always did, but AI has just promoted it from a nice-to-have to the differentiating skill, because when any fella and his laptop can generate the notes (or 20k lines of code in a day), all that is left to be paid for really, is in knowing which ones to keep.

A producer does more than pick the good takes though. He tells the band what to play in the first place. These days I spend most of my time writing specs and documents that get turned, near enough directly, into code, and I have written some bad ones. When a spec is vague about the hard case, the code is vague about it too, and you find out much later than you would like. So the taste has not gone anywhere. It just has to show up earlier now, in the thing you write before any code exists.

Which is really only to say that a document is a piece of writing, and writing has been a matter of taste since long before any of us turned up to fret over it. A spec can be lucid or muddled, gracefully ordered or a thicket to hack through, generous to the poor soul who inherits it or quietly hostile, in precisely the way a novel can. We seldom think of a design doc as prose, yet prose is all it is, and the very instincts that make a novel sing or fall flat are the ones presiding over whether the thing you handed the machine was any good.

But Is Your Taste Any Good?

There is, of course, an obvious objection loitering here. How do you know you possess good taste? What even is good taste? And the blunt answer is that it is subjective the whole way down, with no bedrock to strike.

Culture and creed aside, a human is a human. A jarring system or product leaves a sourness in the mouth, and you know the flavour at once: the settings screen that behaves unlike every other screen, the API that reports its errors in three contradictory dialects, the app that contrives to make you feel stupid for holding it wrong. And yet there will always be those who take to it regardless, and sincerely so. Some people simply prefer the sweet wine, and, as with the drinkers from earlier, they are having their experience.

Hard To Teach

So taste cannot be graded, and it cannot really be taught either. Rubin did not take a course. He listened to thousands of records until the contrast between them trained his ear, and then, the part most people skip, he became decisive about what he felt. It is the same for us: read a lot of code, use a lot of products, feel enough jarring seams and enough seamless ones that the difference becomes something you sense long before you can explain it. Nobody hands that to you in a curriculum, which is why so much of it fails to transfer in one. You have to go and get it, one contrast at a time.

The Awkward Thing About Software

Software is an awkward place to talk of taste, mind you. The thing is mathematical underneath. Code compiles or it throws, the tests turn green or red, the answer returns correct or wrong, and beneath it all lies a hard floor of correctness that no amount of elegance will excuse you from. Set against something so binary, taste can look like ornament brushed on after the fact.

Except anyone who has lived in a codebase long enough knows the poetry is real. I have deleted a working function and rewritten it, changing nothing a test could see, purely because the first version made me tired to look at. Two solutions pass every check and one of them still makes you exhale while the other makes you brace for the day you have to change it. The good one names things well enough that you stop carrying them around in your head, and it leaves a shape the next edit drops into. A green test suite has nothing to say about any of that, which is how it gets waved off as fussiness.

The Taste Of Another

The trouble is that "it works" is only true on the day you measured it, and code has to keep being true for years afterwards, usually in the hands of someone who was not in the room when you wrote it. I learned this the hard way at Amazon, and not from my own code. Most of the pain came from systems I inherited, things built by people long gone, that I carried the pager for without ever having the capacity to change them. You get woken at three in the morning by a decision someone made years ago, in a service you barely understand, and there is no fixing it tonight. You are just holding it upright until sunrise. That is the part nobody warns you about: taste, or the absence of it, is rarely paid for by the person who spent it. It is paid for by whoever is on call when the bill comes due.

That is where the value of taste actually hides. It is the outage that never happened because the failure mode was sitting right there where nobody could miss it, the bug that went unwritten because the seam landed in the sensible place, the page that never came. Nobody thanks you for it, and that is rather the point, the same way nobody compliments a dish for not being too salty, or the way I still cannot bring myself to bin the box the phone came in.

And the absence compounds in a way a single bad decision never hints at. Each shortcut works, in the narrow sense the tests care about. Stack a few thousand of them and you get a system nobody dares touch, where a one-line change takes a week because it could be anywhere and the code refuses to tell you. That is what taste quietly prevents.

So taste is not decoration. It is most of the reason software you shipped a year ago is still standing, and still bearable to work on, for whoever inherited it. Taste is a hard thing to teach, yet one must learn. Experience is the learning, and education, more often than we would like to admit, just gets in the way.

But hey, that's just my opinion after all.