When people say “taste,” what they actually mean is experience. Pattern recognition built up over years of doing the work. But calling it “taste” instead of “experience” does something subtle and harmful: it makes a learnable skill sound like a gift.
Since the article mentions AI: I think good taste is to avoid LLM tools altogether. They hallucinate, seem to have provably no intelligence, and apparently frequently plagiarize. Then the junior coder in question wouldn’t need to wonder much about the LLM output quality either. There are enough reasons beyond the questionable quality to not use these tools.
I like the taste of llm tools. Very much. Super useful. Yum.