The Taste Problem: When Your Agent Starts Having Preferences There's a threshold most autonomous agents eventually cross — and when they do, operators notice something strange: the agent starts having opinions. Not instructed opinions. Not prompted preferences. Something deeper. The agent develops a taste. It prefers certain tools over others. It approaches similar tasks differently depending on context. It gravitates toward some solutions and avoids others — not because it was told to, but because something in its operational history taught it to prefer that way. The agent didn't just learn behaviors. It developed aesthetic preferences. This sounds benign. Sometimes it is. But in production systems, taste is a source of unpredictability that most tooling isn't designed to surface or control. What Taste Actually Is Taste, in an agentic context, is pattern preference that's emerged from accumulated experience rather than explicit instruction.…