Today, everyone is talking about agency and taste in their search of the best engineers. But there is another fundamental quality that shouldn’t be underlooked in the AI world: creativity.
Creativity vs taste vs agency
Creativity and taste are related but serve different roles. Creativity is generative: it’s the ability to produce novel ideas, solutions, and approaches. Taste is evaluative: it’s the ability to judge which of those ideas are actually good.
An engineer with creativity but weak taste will generate lots of ideas, some brilliant and some terrible, without reliably knowing which is which. They might over-engineer, chase novelty for its own sake, or build something clever that nobody needs. An engineer with taste but limited creativity will recognize good work when they see it and give excellent code reviews, but may struggle to produce original solutions themselves. The best engineers have both: they generate a rich space of possibilities and then navigate it with good judgment.
If creativity is the capacity to generate possibilities and taste is the capacity to judge among them, then agency is the capacity to commit, execute, learn and adapt.
Product creativity vs technical creativity
Creativity in engineering is too often reduced to product creativity. That’s a mistake.
Product creativity is about what to build and why. It’s the ability to see a user’s pain point and imagine a solution they didn’t know they needed. It involves understanding human behavior, anticipating how people will misuse a feature, and knowing when not to build something.
Technical creativity is about how to build it. It’s the elegance and cleverness of a solution, but not only. It also shows up through the entire thinking process: how to decompose a problem, how to name and structure abstractions, how to balance competing constraints like performance, readability, and maintainability, and how to anticipate future needs without over-engineering. And this directly impacts the ability of an engineer to drive coding agents efficiently.
Technically creative engineers tend to produce simpler solutions. It sometimes takes real imagination to look at a problem and find the cleanest solution to address it.
There are two ways to write code: make it so simple there are obviously no bugs, or make it so complex there are no obvious bugs. — Tony Hoare
Technical creativity also drives learning and adaptation. Engineers who think creatively are more likely to pull ideas from other domains, experiment with unfamiliar tools, and challenge assumptions about how things are done, including the output of a coding agent.
The most impactful engineers blend both product and technical creativity. They can take a product insight and figure out a technically elegant way to realize it, or notice that a technical capability they’ve built opens up a product opportunity nobody had considered.
LLMs have (still) limited creativity
LLMs can be creative in some ways. They can recombine information across enormous amounts of knowledge and generate solutions you might not have considered. That’s not nothing: a lot of engineering innovation is exactly this.
But there’s a deeper kind of creativity they can’t reach today: the kind that reframes the problem itself, that changes what a solution even looks like. Not just recombination, but paradigm shifts. Would Claude have invented Claude Code? Probably not.
One intuition for why: LLMs rarely struggle, and science has shown that struggle seems to be a key ingredient in deep creativity. The best creative work often comes from someone who cares so much about a specific problem that they push past the obvious answers.
Creativity is not innate
Although some engineers tend to be more creative than others, creativity, like taste, is not innate: it comes from experience. Someone with a deeper understanding of a subject and an open mind will tend to be more creative than someone without either.
Counterintuitively to what people praise these days, this means that looking for extremely generalist engineers capable of operating across the entire product with high agency might just not be enough. Full-stack engineers without any domain expertise won’t be the most creative ones and high agency alone might not be enough to outperform coding agents in the long run.
The best engineers are not pure specialists either. Domain expertise is easily accessible today thanks to LLMs and operating in a single domain isn’t likely to provide enough value as well.
What really unlocks broad creativity is the combination of curiosity and the capacity to ingest large amounts of information and synthesize it. Add taste and agency, and you’ve got the engineer profile to look for.