What is the big deal with "Taste"

Hey Everyone - I hope you had a nice weekend! I’ve had a bit of trouble staying on top of things lately. I’ve been in a good grind mode with my work, but my health and eating habits have gotten away from me. Hopefully this will be easier when I’m growing all my own food!

This week:

Let’s dive in.

Paul Graham posted something on X this weekend that kicked off a firestorm.

"When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make."

Within hours, tech Twitter was debating whether "taste" is the new core skill of the AI era. OpenAI's Greg Brockman weighed in. Cloudflare's CTO Dane Knecht linked back to a post he wrote in January arguing that taste is now the engineering differentiator. A Google engineer wrote that "AI will make anything but it takes human taste to decide if it's worth keeping." Rick Rubin clips started circulating everywhere, specifically the interview where Anderson Cooper asks what he actually does in the studio given that he has no technical ability. Rubin's answer: "The confidence that I have in my taste."

Then the memes started. People photoshopping Rubin's face onto software engineers. Jokes about listing "taste" on your LinkedIn. The discourse was messy, funny, and more important than most people realized.

Because underneath the noise, something real is happening.

AI has made execution remarkably cheap. You can scaffold an app in an afternoon. Generate a hundred variations of ad copy in minutes. Build a landing page without writing a line of CSS. Produce a first draft of almost anything before lunch.

That changes what matters.

When the cost of making things drops toward zero, the value shifts to knowing what is worth making. Choosing what to build. Deciding what to cut. Recognizing the difference between technically correct and actually good. That is taste. And it is becoming the scarcest input in the entire stack.

Look at how the most effective builders I know actually spend their time. They are not grinding through execution anymore. They are thinking about what to prioritize. They are saying no to features that are easy to build but wrong for the product. They are choosing which problems deserve their attention and which ones are distractions disguised as opportunities.

The people who are struggling are often the ones who are technically excellent but strategically unfocused. They can build anything. They just do not know what to build. AI made their execution skills abundant and their judgment skills scarce overnight.

This shows up in the tools I use every day. When I sit down with an AI assistant, the quality of the output is almost entirely determined by the quality of my thinking. Do I know what I actually want. Do I understand the problem well enough to frame it clearly. Can I tell the difference between a response that sounds good and one that actually is good.

That is taste applied to AI. And it matters far more than which model you use or how clever your prompt is.

I think this is why the discourse struck a nerve. People in technical fields spent years being valued for their ability to execute difficult things. Now execution is getting commoditized and the thing that differentiates them is harder to define, harder to teach, and harder to prove on a resume.

But taste is not magic. It is not some innate gift you either have or you do not.

Taste is pattern recognition built through reps. It comes from making things, watching what works, studying what you admire, and developing the confidence to say "this is not good enough" even when it took five seconds to produce. A chef develops taste by cooking thousands of meals. A designer develops taste by shipping hundreds of projects. A writer develops taste by publishing enough to know the difference between a sentence that works and one that just fills space.

So if you are wondering what skill to invest in right now, here is my take.

Stop optimizing your workflow. Start optimizing your judgment.

Use AI to produce faster. But trust yourself to decide what is worth producing.

That combination — speed from machines, direction from humans — is the actual winning strategy. And it looks nothing like AI.

As many of you know, I’ve been deep down the rabbit hole of newsletters. I still believe they are one of the quickest and most reliable ways to build an online or local community.

I’ve been experimenting with this one as well as 2 others. A big problem that I have historically faced is that I just build stuff and don’t think about the costs or the profits. I just put it out there and hope it makes more money than I spend on it. That is… not a good way to run a business.

Fortunately, I can just code something that keeps track of all of these things for me. I’ve been building a simple app that lets me link my Meta ads data (main cost), my beehiiv data (newsletter platform), and my Stripe (main way I get paid).

This gives me an easy way to see all of the profit and loss on the business.

To date, I’ve never built a full platform by myself. I’ve always had other people help set up the subscriptions, payments, etc. I’ve decided to do everything for this one and see how it goes. I’m pretty much only building this for myself, but I figure some other people who are running newsletters may use it too.

Here is the landing page (please do not sign up, it is not at all ready for users lol): https://www.letterledgers.com/

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. I got really interested in what it takes to create a sustainable food ecosystem.

When the world shifts, the people who move first tend to win. But moving fast requires resources. And resources require access to capital.

Most people do not think of this as a skill. They think of it as a situation. You either have money or you do not. You either qualify for a loan or you do not. But access to capital is something you can actively build, and the time to build it is before you need it.

And capital is not just money. It is also knowing the right people with the right skills and being able to recruit them. If you can walk into a room and say "I have the engineer, the designer, and the operator ready to go," that is capital. It is often more convincing than a bank statement. The ability to assemble a team is frequently what unlocks financial capital in the first place, because investors and partners do not just bet on ideas. They bet on the people who can execute them.

There are really three levers here.

The first is relationships. Knowing the right people is not about schmoozing. It is about being in rooms where capital flows, both financial and human, and having a reputation that makes people want to work with you. When I need to move on an opportunity, the first thing I do is not open a bank app. I call someone. The ability to pick up the phone and have a real conversation with someone who can write a check, make an introduction, or bring a critical skill to the table is worth more than most financial instruments.

The second is assets. Owning something that can be leveraged changes your position entirely. For me, buying a house was not just a lifestyle decision. It was a strategic one. A cash out refinance turns equity into deployable capital without selling anything. You do not need to be a real estate investor to think this way. You just need to own something that gives you options when the moment comes.

The third is credibility. Can you sell an idea. Can you articulate a vision clearly enough that someone else is willing to bet on it, with their money or their time. This is a skill that compounds. Every time you pitch something and deliver on it, your track record grows. Every time your track record grows, the next conversation gets easier. The gap between people who can raise capital and people who cannot is often just the gap between people who have demonstrated results and people who have not.

Here is what makes this a survival skill specifically. AI is going to create enormous disruption over the next few years. Industries will shift. New opportunities will appear fast and disappear faster. The people who can access capital quickly, through relationships, assets, or credibility, will be the ones who can actually act on what they see coming. Everyone else will watch from the sidelines and say they saw it too.

You do not need to be wealthy to start building this. Grow your network intentionally. Create a track record by shipping things and documenting results. Build assets, even small ones. Learn to recruit. The goal is not to have capital sitting around. The goal is to know exactly where to find it, financial and human, when the window opens.