You don't really want taste
Over the past six months or so, “taste” has become the new it metaskill in the AI builder/maker/whatever world.
Paul Graham tweeted that as AI makes creation cheap, “the big differentiator is what you choose to make.”
David Droga echoed the same idea from the creative world: “In a world where everyone uses the same AI tools, taste becomes the critical differentiator.“
Greg Brockman is calling it: “Taste is a new core skill.“
They’re all pointing at something real, for sure. You can now build anything with coding agents (kind of) so what you choose to build is what matters (sidenote: but hasn’t that always been the case? Eh, let’s just park that for now).
But there also seems to be a category error here as folks across the board are getting #tastepilled and reciting these ideas in posts and meetings.
The error is framing taste as an attribute. Something innate. (tech does love a good lone genius story) But it isn’t. Taste is a consequence. An outcome.
It’s the intentional dedication and combination of time, attention, and care.
It may not be what people want to hear, but it is the truth.
It’s much less glamorous and less appealing to people who want to believe the only thing that’s held back their genius this whole time was the ability to make their ideas real and the coding agents have finally unshackled them from their earthly bonds.
But the ability to execute isn’t what holds back the development or expression of taste.
You don’t develop taste by scanning the headings. Or watching just the highlights. Or listening at 2x speed. Or asking AI for the key takeaways. Or finding the perfect prompt that lights the neural net in the most exquisite path ever seen.
Those things can be part of developing taste, sure, but that’s not the hard part.
People are confusing compressed information with compressed experience. Information compresses much more easily than experience, so we conflate the former for the latter. (Go watch the “You’re just a kid” scene from Good Will Hunting for a more eloquent articulation of this point.)
The hard part isn’t the quantity of ingestion, though that can be tough at times, it is the sustained care and attention over time.
The accumulation of endless examples. The constant, at times involuntary, comparisons to establish which of two options is better? Why? What would change my opinion about that? How does that relate to other comparisons I’ve made? Other preferences I have? Each one justified either explicitly in your head or implicitly through your physical reaction to something - “No, not THAT one.”
Years or decades of noticing tiny differences that everyone else stops seeing. Staying sensitive to a topic that your mind is trying desperately to desensitize you to it over time through repetition, competing targets of your limited attention, and boredom.
Your time, attention, and care aren’t free. You can’t attend to two things at once. So taste is matured through an accumulation of tradeoffs at a grand scale.
Your taste in one area is the mark of neglect in another. A choice. A sacrifice. A priority. A path taken.
(Btw, Loredana Crisan at Figma has a post I really like about the ongoing nature of cultivating taste)
I think most people know that taste requires time and attention. Probably nothing all that new there. But I want to talk a bit more about care.
Care is rare.
Care is what metabolizes focus into depth.
Without it, you’re just building surface pattern recognition out of examples. Yes to this style. No to that one. But care is what attaches it to your identity. To who you see yourself as. To your story about yourself. Someone who is obsessed with X. Someone who can’t NOT give their opinion on Y. Someone who MUST experience Z because nothing else will do.
Someone who gives a damn.
And that’s not what I’m seeing in most of these conversations. People want taste without giving a damn. And I don’t think it works that way.
Much of the story of AI is about compression. Summarize the book. Extract the framework. Distill the principles. Generate the draft. Skip to the answer.
You can compress information. You can’t compress the slow process of deciding what deserves your attention in the first place. You can’t compress care.
Taste isn’t choosing between the options someone else gives you. It’s deciding what matters before those options exist. Then having the conviction to stand behind that judgment.
Will taste become the defining skill of the AI era?
Maybe.
But only for people willing to dedicate the time, attention, and care to build it. Only for people willing to give a damn when no one is looking.
And I don’t think a lot of people really want to pay for that.
Use of AI disclosure: I gave an AI an early version of the idea for this post and went back and forth on some of the concepts a few times. I had it create a first draft. I then rewrote every line in the draft. I’ve found this is my most common writing approach these days. It is sometimes easier for me to know what’s wrong and correct it than to pull right out of the ether. Pangram thinks this is 91% human-written, which sounds about right to me.