Bringing Taste to Intelligence
My oldest son has been a Star Wars fan where I am more into Star Trek… with The Next Generation being the GOAT. Like many, Commander Data holds a particular spot in my heart… the age old story of Pinocchio where the non-human teaches the most about humanity.As I rewatch the episodes of ST:TNG, and see Data grow, it’s hard not to make the obvious parallels to our newest incarnation of AI. We have new LLMs from various frontier labs, and every time we fire them up it’s like booting up Data for the first time. Great intelligence sits within the weights. Mapped experience lies within. Yet it is hard to know what experience is lacking, and it’s obvious to see the importance of onboarding.
Rise of the Taste Makers
Great designers are valuable indeed. They not only have great skill, but they have taste. If we do this right, we will be able to amplify their taste.
I hire an interior designer with taste, and I enjoy the process of working with them to curate an experience that I will love in my home. I may not be able to come up with the design, but I have opinions on what I want, and I know what I like when I see it.
Every home you enter has a personal feel, something unique. I love this and want the same for many of my computing experiences. There are familiar building blocks, great for usability, but I don’t want a world where every UI looks the same. That’s boring and soulless.
I loved the early Web for its character, as strange as some of it is. The fashion evolved quickly, as we worked out what worked… and explored a new space. There is still so much to explore, and I want new AI design tools to help me, through their own skill… and through connecting me to taste makers.
Enter Stitch
One such tool caught my attention: Stitch, a product from Google Labs. The results seemed different… more diverse. I got to meet the team behind it, one that works in a group focused on the future of software development, which has some friends from the past who I found thriving. I found myself so excited about the mission that I worked to join them… and they have kindly given me that opportunity.
To pull this off we need to weave models deeply trained on great design, with a user experience that lets users wield that power. We have the seeds, with so many ideas and experiments to run and learn from.
This week we shipped a new version of Stitch that contains many performance and reliability updates, and an overhaul to the main window that gives you the freedom of an infinite canvas to play in. It’s a pleasure to use, and is a foundation we are building on.
You can see it in action with Kath’s demo that weaves together the latest Stitch with Jules, a sister project to Stitch in labs, which just had an epic week of launches as it came out of beta. Jules is an asynchronous coding agent that you can work with to massively scale your development efforts.
Taste Goes Beyond Design
There are so many areas of taste. Stitch cares about design and frontend, and Jules also cares about the taste in building great software.
We all have our own taste. A developer who picks Vue.js, does so in part because of the taste of Evan You and team. A die hard Clojure fan, follows the taste of Rich Hickey. Open Source has long been a spot for taste makers to share, and for the community to gather.
There is taste in all things code and software projects, and we can create layers that allow those who excel in accessibility to shine through more of us, as with performance, composition, and security, and on and on.
Manifesting Ideas
One of the reasons I am so very excited about the revolution we are all currently a part of, is in its potential to take away friction so that ideas can become real. What was once expensive is on the path to become so very cheap. And marrying taste with intelligence to get a sea of experiences that are delightful to use.
If you want to fight for a more utopian future vs. dystopian, we are hiring across the board. If you love building the future of computing with like minded folk, please reach out!
/fin