taste

• physical server aesthetics
• button textures, green cell grids
• technical, clear design style
• information hierarchy, text and graphic readability

• content of this kind is held in high regard
• hopium and grandiosity and restraint all at once

• the right way to morph text in interfaces
• use for UI work which would benefit from this

• atmospheric styling (relevant to the product, a self-serve + forward deployed platform for RL on open source models, i.e., hill-climbing)
• grain/papery texture over graphics
• subtly animated fog
• smooth abstract graphics animated on scroll (manifolds, text highlight morphing)

• note extensibility and structural design taste
• devtools need to be designed like devtools, and products like products, and in some cases both

• this site is included for its high-entropy content and mystique
• vie mccoy is a red-teaming ai safety researcher at openai
• this website and all its subpages (note: the main page alone is not sufficient to gain a concrete understanding of the content that caused it to make this taste list) are worth reading

• example of a great coding agent TUI
• also a great example of extensible software purpose-built and well-thought-out for its contextual purpose (a coding agent with extensions that hot-reload, meaning that it can improve itself iteratively)
• the tree system for chats is highly intuitive in comparison to linear chat histories which don't accurately represent coding agents with subtasks and subagents
• sane defaults and extensibility for the rest

notice:

• the background grain
• the typography
• and ESPECIALLY the animation on the file upload area (not a static gradient, it's a live @paper-design/shaders-react Dithering component with shape="warp". Color shifts from #0f1a24 (dormant deep blue) to #1a4a3a (active forest green) on drag/hover, and the speed ramps from 0.2 to 0.6. The shader breathes.)
• github repo available here: github.com/tetraslam/delve-onsite

things to take note of

• ionian pillar
• blue sky, atmospheric, open feel
• fast-loading, clean, smooth screen recording gif of using the platform, with a preloaded project with many visuals of robot schematics, many animations of the robot moving
• incredible aesthetic robot hand generated using (presumably) nano banana + veo 3 (from the frame), highly aesthetic robot arm and movement
• greek aesthetics, images and aesthetic representing trust, foundational work, futurism (greco-futurism is in vogue right now)

this supports a lot of cases and is hackable. use for

• dithering an image
• whether it's monochromatic or colored
• dithering can be more distinct with a gradient-like effect
• dither over animations/gifs

• aesthetic patterns require structure, decent speed, consistent temporal novelty, and even distribution between clusters
• colors used matter a lot (reconciling contrast and the color palette is important)

cool shaders and a library to use them.

• effects are best used on top of visual regions with no foreground text/etc since that minimizes clashing and maximizes the cool effect
• dither on animated components/gifs looks incredible