Taste, Craft, or Something More?

The bottleneck has shifted.

For most of human history, the challenge was producing things.

If you wanted a painting, someone had to spend weeks painting it.

If you wanted software, someone had to spend months writing it.

If you wanted a song, an article, a logo, or a marketing campaign, somebody had to sit down and create it from scratch.

The people who could produce had an advantage.

Today, production is becoming abundant.

A logo can be generated in seconds.

A landing page can appear before you've finished your coffee.

A code scaffold can materialize from a prompt.

An article draft can be generated before you've finished thinking through the first paragraph.

The challenge is no longer producing.

The challenge is deciding what is worth producing.

The bottleneck has shifted.

From creation to judgment.

And that shift has made one word suddenly relevant again: Taste.

Taste Is Suddenly Having a Moment

It feels like everyone is talking about taste.

Designers are talking about it.

Writers are talking about it.

Founders are talking about it.

Engineers are talking about it.

Not because taste suddenly became important.

But because AI has exposed how valuable it has always been.

When creation becomes cheap, discernment becomes expensive.

Anyone can generate ten options.

Not everyone can recognize the one worth pursuing.

The First Taste I Recognized

When I started my career, there were people I looked up to.

Founders.

Senior engineers.

People who seemed a few steps ahead of everyone else.

I noticed the things around them.

The way they dressed.

The books they recommended.

The technology products they gravitated towards.

The niche hobbies they seemed to collect along the way.

The founder who always seemed to know about a product before everyone else.

The engineer whose workspace felt intentional rather than accidental.

The person who somehow always knew what was worth paying attention to.

At the time, I would have said this person had aura.

And honestly, I think a lot of us do this.

We encounter someone whose choices seem unusually deliberate, and we call it confidence, charisma or aura.

Whatever word we choose, we're trying to describe the same thing.

A way of moving through the world that feels intentional.

I wanted that too.

So I decided to do what most people do.

I copied it.

The clothes.

The tools.

The habits.

The products.

The aesthetics.

If someone I admired used it, I wanted to try it.

There was even a period where I started wearing native more often after reading Making It Big by Femi Otedola.

In my head, I wasn't copying the clothes.

I was trying to borrow whatever it was that made successful people feel successful.

Some of those choices stayed.

Many didn't.

And that was the first clue.

Because if the clothes were the answer, they should have worked.

If the products were the answer, they should have worked.

If the aesthetics were the answer, they should have worked.

But they weren't.

Why Copying It Never Quite Worked

Like my sister would say:

"You can't teach anyone aura."

The older I get, the more I think she's right.

Not because aura is some mystical thing people are born with.

But because what we often call taste is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions.

Decisions about what to keep.

What to discard.

What to admire.

What to ignore.

Decisions repeated over years until they become instinct.

What I began to understand was that what I was observing wasn't aura.

It was taste.

The clothes weren't the taste.

The books weren't the taste.

The furniture wasn't the taste.

The native wear wasn't the taste.

Those things were merely evidence that taste had been there.

Taste was the thing underneath.

The judgment behind the choices.

The accumulated experiences.

The comparisons.

The preferences.

The countless moments of deciding:

"This resonates with me."

"This doesn't."

Over time, those decisions compound into something that looks effortless from the outside.

Two Forms of Taste

When we talk about taste, I think we're often talking about two different things.

Personal Taste and Tastefulness.

The two overlap.

But they are not the same thing.

Personal Taste

Personal taste answers a simple question:

What feels like me?

It develops through exposure.

Through curiosity.

Through experimentation.

Through trying things and discovering what resonates.

My first job exposed me to unfamiliar culture, art, systems, and technology products that I could compare against what I'd known before.

Some of those choices stayed with me.

Others disappeared as quickly as they arrived.

Slowly, a filter began to emerge.

I became better at recognizing what felt aligned with who I was becoming and what wasn't.

That's personal taste.

And over time, it becomes a surprisingly powerful tool.

Because when there are thousands of options available, a strong sense of self becomes a filter.

"What isn't me" gets discarded almost immediately.

What's left deserves closer attention.

Tastefulness

Tastefulness answers a different question:

What is considered excellent within a craft?

Good taste looks different depending on where you are.

In architecture, it might be proportion and balance.

In music, it might be restraint.

In writing, it might be clarity.

In engineering, it might be simplicity.

A preference for solutions that are elegant rather than complicated.

Systems that are understandable rather than clever.

Interfaces that feel obvious rather than impressive.

This kind of taste isn't purely personal.

It's shaped by communities.

Disciplines.

Standards.

Years of accumulated knowledge.

Taste Is Just Discernment Wearing Better Clothes

When people talk about cultivating taste, they're often talking about discernment.

Taste sounds artistic.

Discernment sounds practical.

But I suspect they're describing the same thing.

The ability to separate signal from noise.

The timeless from the trendy.

The elegant from the complicated.

The useful from the merely impressive.

Every field has its own version of this.

The names change.

The underlying skill doesn't.

What Good Taste Looks Like in Engineering

One place I've seen this most clearly is in engineering.

A junior engineer often asks:

"Can we build this?"

An engineer with developed taste asks:

"Should we build this?"

"Why are we building this?"

The technical challenge is rarely the hardest part.

The harder challenge is identifying which problems deserve solving in the first place.

Good engineering taste might look like:

Choosing simplicity over cleverness.

Writing code that others can understand.

Recognizing when abstraction helps.

Recognizing when abstraction hurts.

Understanding that sometimes the best feature is the one you never build.

The code is visible.

The judgment behind it is not.

Why This Matters More In The AI Era

AI can generate options.

Thousands of them.

It can propose designs.

Write articles.

Generate code.

Create images.

Suggest strategies.

What it cannot do is decide which option matters.

Which reflects your values.

Which serves your audience.

Which aligns with the person you're trying to become.

Those are judgment problems.

And judgment comes from experience.

From exposure.

From comparison.

From reflection.

In other words:

Taste.

The more abundant creation becomes, the more valuable discernment becomes.

Cultivating Taste

The encouraging thing is that taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed upon a lucky few.

It can be developed.

Like any other skill.

Consume great work.

Study people operating at a high level and ask why their work resonates.

Dissect decisions.

Every great product contains a trail of trade-offs. Follow them.

Leave your lane.

Engineers should study architecture.

Writers should study product design.

Designers should study music.

Taste compounds when ideas cross disciplines.

Most importantly, build things.

Nothing sharpens judgment like wrestling with constraints yourself.

You begin to understand why good work is difficult.

And why truly great work is rare.

The New Scarcity

For a long time, skill meant being able to create.

Increasingly, skill may mean being able to choose.

Not every possibility deserves pursuit.

Not every option deserves attention.

Not every generated output deserves existence.

Production is becoming abundant.

Judgment remains scarce.

And in a world overflowing with possibilities, the ability to recognize what is worth keeping may become one of the most valuable skills of all.