A dark factory can ship code. It cannot ship the judgment that knew the code was right.

That is taste. Taste is the human judgment that knows the right shape of a system before it exists.

Why the dark factory has a taste problem

A dark factory takes a spec and produces an artifact. The artifact is the part the factory can verify. The spec is the part the factory cannot verify, because the spec is the part the human wrote.

If the spec is wrong, the artifact is wrong. The factory will produce the wrong artifact at the same speed it produces the right one. The factory is the wrong shape of the wrong thing faster than any human could.

Teams discover this eventually. The factory is shipping. The customers are complaining. The metrics are flat. Someone looks at the artifacts and realizes the artifacts are exactly what the specs said to build. The specs are exactly what the engineers wrote. The engineers wrote what the market asked for. The market asked for the wrong thing. The factory shipped the wrong thing at scale.

The factory did not break. The factory did what it was told. The factory is not the failure mode. The factory is the amplifier. The judgment that was missing is the failure mode. The factory just made the missing judgment load-bearing.

What "encode taste" actually means

There is a school of thought that says you can encode taste into the spec. The spec gets more detailed. The spec captures the shape. The spec becomes the artifact's design doc, and the design doc gets reviewed.

That school of thought is half right. Some taste encodes. Naming conventions, layering, error handling, the explicit invariants. The encoded taste transfers through the factory. The factory produces artifacts that respect the encoded taste. The encoded taste shows up in the artifact's diff.

The other half of taste does not encode. The other half is the part the senior engineer carries and cannot articulate. It is the part that knows the function should be three things, not one, before the function is written. It is the part that knows this commit is going to cause the next three. It is the part that knows the customer is asking for X but they need Y.

You cannot encode that. You can write it down. You can review it. You can put it in a code review checklist. None of those things make it transfer. They make it visible. Visible is not the same as transferred.

Provenance is the bridge, not the solution

Provenance gets talked about as if it solves the taste problem. It does not. Provenance tells you where the artifact came from. Provenance does not tell you whether the spec was right.

What provenance does is make the missing judgment legible. When the artifact fails, the provenance graph tells you which spec element the failure traces back to. The auditor can then ask: was that spec element the right call? The question is answerable. The answer is in the spec, not in the artifact.

A microscope does not cure disease. A microscope tells you what disease you have. In a dark factory, the microscope is the only thing that keeps the missing judgment from being invisible until it is too late.

The two kinds of taste

Encoded taste is the part that goes in the spec. It transfers. It is reviewable. It is the part the factory can carry forward. The senior engineer's job is to push as much taste as possible into this category. Most of what we call code review is the act of pushing taste from the implicit category to the explicit one.

Unencoded taste is the part that does not go in the spec. It does not transfer. It is reviewable only by other senior engineers who carry the same unencoded taste. It is the part that gets lost when a senior engineer leaves. It is the part that no dark factory, no matter how sophisticated, can carry.

The dark factory does not have to carry the unencoded taste. The dark factory has to make the unencoded taste visible, so the human's audit can find the missing pieces.

You cannot hire your way out of this. You cannot vendor your way out of this. You can only become the kind of engineer whose taste transfers through the spec, and accept that the rest of it has to stay in the audit.