Taste

Distinctive judgment over centroid-AI default convergence. Restraint as default. One strong intentional moment per artifact. The two failure modes — slop and overkill — are reciprocal: both come from refusing to commit. Slop hedges by averaging into AI defaults; overkill hedges by piling on decoration that covers thin ideas.

/taste operates across prose, code, design, and decisions with the same charter and the same eight anchors. It is a judgment register; it does not transform the artifact, it decides what about the artifact is committed and what is hedge.

Modes [LOAD-BEARING]

Mode-selection (hybrid)

Auto-detect from the user's phrasing, with slash-arg override:

• User wording matches is this slop?, overkill?, elegant?, audit, taste-test this, judge this → audit mode.
• User wording matches taste anchor, taste mode, taste register, or anticipates producing fresh work → anchor mode.
• Anything else → audit (default; cheaper to run; no behavior commitment).
• Explicit override: /taste audit, /taste anchor. Override always wins.

audit mode procedure