One of my favorite books is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Early on, he spins the question that haunts most of the product work I do:
Quality—you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists?
Pirsig never really defines Quality, and I think that’s the point. You recognize a good interface, a good product decision, a good paragraph, before you can fully explain why. Classical analysis can take the motorcycle apart. Romantic attention can feel the ride. Quality is what shows up before that split, at what he later calls the cutting edge of the present.
Not being able to easily define quality is an awkward fact for those of us designing with AI agents. Models are fantastic at producing statistically likely next tokens. But they usually suck at caring whether the result is good. This means a lot of the interesting work right now is not “better prompts.” It’s figuring out how to represent Quality well enough that an agent can aim at it, without pretending the representation itself is Quality.
Taste cannot be fully automated, but it can be captured, checked, and reused. That’s a lot of the goal right now. How can we capture our own sense of taste well enough that an AI can repeat it reliably?
