Beauty in software is a virtue
Why I keep building UIs and why a sense of beauty is such a big competitive advantage
“Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”
— Wittgenstein“If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.”
— Nietzsche
For some reason I can’t quite understand, I keep going back to front-end development. I wrote some Go for a couple of years, then I went back to UIs. I did some cloud and infrastructure work, then went back to React.
Other fields are better organized, their communities are less fragmented, they’ve got better tooling and fewer problems with dependencies.
But there’s something satisfying in rounded corners and box shadows.
There’s beauty in it.
A theorem can be beautiful, an algorithm can be beautiful, a system can be beautifully designed, a database schema can be done so well it gives a sense of beauty. But that’s abstract.
Visual aesthetic is something you don’t need to be an engineer to appreciate.
It speaks to the caveman in me who stares at a drawing on the stone wall after a long day of chasing mammoths.
What exactly is beauty?
Christopher Alexander called it the quality without a name. Paul Graham tried to formulate the different qualities that contribute to beauty.
It’s a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses.
The spoken language remains too poor to explain it.
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but we’re all looking for the same features. We know how to recognize it. We value symmetry, proportions, clarity. We know how to recognize it.
It sounds subjective, but it isn’t.
We know when it’s missing. We know when something feels designed but isn’t.
To say that beauty is entirely subjective is to
Recognizing beauty requires taste
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
No, that’s just how developed one’s taste is.
Taste means your neurons are wired so that they fire when you see beauty.
Rick Rubin talks about taste a lot.
But the topic has entered the mainstream lately because of AI.
When development speed is accelerating, and you’re prototyping twice as fast, having a beautiful end goal is the difference between people marvelling at your work and calling it slop.
In the past, I never allowed myself to chase beauty.
I chased employment, I chased a promotion, I chased productivity.
You’d see software, and you’d see great software. Teams knew that building great software was out of reach for them because it required the technical time to implement it and taste.
Iterating to make something great just took too long.
And as a side effect, people couldn’t improve their taste.
But in the year 2026, chasing productivity and trying to build more of the same okay software (only quickly) seems foolish. Trying to orchestrate agents like StarCraft armies to release more shovelware in the world is absurd.
The thing to chase is beauty and taste.
I’ve never been a part of a world-class engineering team. I’ve never worked at a FAANG company. We knew we couldn’t create beauty.
We mostly settled.
We did our best with the knowledge we had and attributed our shortcomings to resources and time.
But time isn’t an excuse anymore.
I go through my work, I look at other people’s work, and it still lacks aesthetic. It was created more efficiently. People had more time to think about it. But it still lacks beauty.
I see the same level of work produced with less energy.
Creation itself is a virtue, but creating beauty is a higher one.
“Can beauty be just a skill in a markdown file that you load to your agent?”
It might be.
But until we can formulate it clearly using spoken language, you still have to rely on your own neural network.
The bottleneck
We argue about the bottleneck in software engineering.
Is it writing code? Thinking about structure and abstractions? Is it reviewing code?
It just might be taste.
You will waste hours and tokens if you don’t know what good code or a good UI is.
Taste is now a competitive advantage in a way it never was before.