Taste
Knowing what “good” looks like before it exists
Many AI builders on my timeline is suddenly talking about taste and judgment.
Here is why
When everyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make." — Paul Graham, Feb 2026
AI is powerful but taste-blind. It can generate 10 landing pages in 30 seconds, write 50 email variants, build an entire support bot overnight. But it has zero idea which one is actually worth shipping.
That’s where you come in. AI + your taste = the real differentiator.
What is Taste: Knowing what “good” looks like before it exists
It’s judgment refined through creation and criticism. Knowing what “good” looks like before it exists — when you’re staring at ten options and nine are wrong. It’s not gut feeling. It’s a learnable skill built through exposure, critique, and practice.
Here’s a real example. Two teams build an AI support agent. Same model, same data.
Team A ships a chatbot that over-apologizes, ignores user history, escalates everything, and measures success by “did it respond?”
Team B ships an agent that knows you already tried the docs, has clear escalation rules for billing and security issues, and measures success by resolution in under 4 messages.
Same tools. Wildly different taste.
As AI handles more of the technical work, taste becomes the most important skill you can develop. Experienced people using AI see massive productivity gains. Juniors using the same tools often can’t tell if the output is good or bad. That gap isn’t about prompting. It’s about taste.
How do you build it?
Study great products. understand WHY they feel different, not just what they do.
Create and ship. You can’t develop taste by reading. Only by making things and seeing what works with real users.
Critique relentlessly. Review your last 5 AI outputs. Write down what you’d change and why. That “why” is your taste developing.
”Taste is a core skill. Evals let you inject your taste and judgment directly into the product’s critical path.”
When everyone can make anything, there’s no demand for average. With the abundance of content and applications, people will always seek out “the best”.
So all AI builder need to master this core skills and use eval to inject your taste and judgement directly in to the product from the begenining.
#taste #Ai