Taste Is the Bottleneck

For most of my career, making things was the expensive part. Writing the code, producing the analysis, drafting the document — that's where the time and the money went, so that's what we optimized and what we paid for. That era is ending. I can now produce a first draft of almost anything in minutes. So can everyone else.

When making something gets cheap, the bottleneck moves. It moves to deciding what's worth making, and to knowing whether what came out is any good. That's taste, and it's about to be the scarce thing.

Production was the moat. It isn't anymore.

A lot of jobs were really just the ability to produce — to turn a vague ask into a competent deliverable. That skill is getting commoditized fast. The model will write the function, draft the memo, build the slide. What it won't do is tell you the memo answers the wrong question, or that the elegant solution solves a problem nobody actually has.

The value isn't in the output anymore. It's in the judgment that points the output somewhere worth going, and the taste that can tell good from merely plausible.

Taste is built, not given

Here's the uncomfortable part: taste comes from exactly the work that's now easy to skip. You develop judgment by making things badly and seeing why, by sitting with a problem long enough to know what good looks like, by being wrong in public and correcting. Let the model do all of that for you and you get output without ever building the thing that knows whether the output is right.

This is the same worry I have about outsourcing your thinking, pointed at the next few years. It's never been easier to produce a confident answer you didn't earn and can't defend.

What I'm doing about it

I still let AI do the heavy lifting on production — it would be silly not to. But I guard the two ends it can't do for me: deciding what's worth doing, and judging whether the result is actually good. I try to keep my own hands dirty enough that my taste stays sharp, because in a world where everyone can produce, the only edge left is knowing what's worth producing.