I’ve been writing code for a long time, which means I’ve also written a tremendous amount of garbage.
Some of it shipped, some of it made money, and some of it sat there for years, glaring at me every time I opened the repo, reminding me that “it works” and “it’s good” are not the same thing.
Now we have AI tools (that I use every day) that can generate that same garbage at breathtaking speed. Groovy. Tools like Claude Code, Codex, agents, MCP servers, the whole strange little circus.
Some days it feels like cheating and other days I watch an agent confidently wire up three abstractions I never asked for, forget the point of the exercise, and then explain itself like it just invented electricity.
Still, when it works, it’s ridiculous, and that's why I started The Tasteful Engineer. This is a community for experienced developers who want to use AI without turning their codebases into a landfill.
Good code is mainatainable code, and that's our focus.