Taste Infrastructure
Quality encoded as executable systems. Evidence gates, craftsmanship philosophy, design principles from the masters, and the argument that taste is a technical discipline.
53 articles
Featured Guides
Design Philosophy Profiles
The Steve Test: Does the Work Deserve to Exist?
Steve Test vs Jiro Test: a product framework for deciding whether work deserves to exist, holds user trust, and belongs in the whole you are building.
John Ternus: The Builder CEO
John Ternus becomes Apple CEO on September 1, 2026. Why Tim Cook's successor signals a builder-led era for Apple hardware, AI, and design.
The Workbench I Carry
Steve Jobs's philosophy of invisible craft, operationalized: whole-widget integrity, refusal, and care inside an AI harness built on Claude Code.
Minimum Worthy Product
MVP became permission to ship weak work. Minimum Worthy Product is a different standard: ship the smallest product that earns belief.
Taste Is a Technical System
Taste decomposes into constraints, evaluation criteria, pattern recognition, and coherence checks. Each component maps to engineering infrastructure.
Dark Factory Verification: When No Human Reads the Code
When humans stop reading code, what does the verification layer look like? Mapping the infrastructure required for fully autonomous AI coding.
Every Hook Is a Scar: 84 Agent Failures Encoded in Code
84 hooks intercept 15 of the 26 lifecycle event types Claude Code exposes. Each one traces back to a specific production failure: wiped caches,...
Quality Is the Only Variable When AI Agents Build
Time, cost, resources, and effort are not constraints. The question is what's right, not what's efficient. A philosophy for building with AI agents.
Taste Is Infrastructure: Encoding Aesthetic Judgment for AI
Agents have capability without opinion. The quality ceiling depends on how well you encode aesthetic judgment into hooks, gates, and constraints.
What I Run Before I Sleep: 15,000 Pages Every Night
Every night: 15,000 pages checked, TTFB measured, cache verified, sitemaps crawled. The goodnight routine is where operational discipline lives.
The Evidence Gate: Proof Over Plausibility in AI Output
\"I believe\" and \"it should\" are not evidence. Every agent completion report needs a file path, test output, or specific code before marking work done.
What Actually Breaks When You Run AI Agents Unsupervised
Seven named failure modes from 500+ autonomous agent sessions. Each has a detection signal, a real example, and a concrete fix. The taxonomy HN asked for.
Anthropic Measured What Works. My Hooks Enforce It.
Anthropic analyzed 9,830 conversations. Iterative refinement doubles fluency markers. Polished outputs suppress evaluation. Quality hooks force iteration.
Runtime Constitutions for AI Agents: A Governance Framework
Runtime constitutions enforce AI agent governance where training-phase alignment fails. Competence checks, output gates, and four subsystems keep...
Your Agent Writes Faster Than You Can Read
Five research groups published about the same problem this week: AI agents produce code faster than developers can understand it. The debt is in your head.
Metacognitive AI: Teaching Your Agent Self-Evaluation
Most agent instructions define behavior. The missing layer teaches self-evaluation. False evidence gates, seven named failure modes, and hedging detection.
Nothing Is Structural: Negative Space as Infrastructure
Negative space is infrastructure, not absence. How emptiness, silence, and whitespace create structure in physics, music, information theory, and design.
Why My AI Agent Has a Quality Philosophy
My Claude Code agent inherited every sloppy human habit at machine speed. I built 3 philosophies, 150+ quality gates, and 95 hooks. Here's what worked.
Critical Yet Kind: Feedback Principles Encoded in 86 Hooks
Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety predicts team performance. I encoded the same principles into automated code review hooks.
Brutalist Web Design Meets Beauty: My Site's Approach
I built my site at the intersection of beauty and brutalism: structural honesty, precise typography, and four opacity tiers on absolute black. No...
Compounding Engineering: Why My Codebase Accelerates
Most codebases slow down as they grow. Mine accelerates. 95 hooks, 44 skills, and 14 configs make each feature cheaper than the last.