Your Code is Becoming Obsolete. Your Taste is Your Future.

AI is closing the gap on execution. The mechanics of coding, the hours spent translating intent into syntax, are being automated away. What remains scarce is not the ability to do, but the ability to decide.

That skill is “taste.”

The Scarcity of Taste

Taste is knowing what’s worth building. It is the instinct to distinguish the trivial from the essential, the fleeting hack from the enduring product. AI can spell out whatever you want; it cannot tell you what you should want in the first place.

AI can generate an endless menu of options, but it cannot choose which one is elegant, durable, or worth the risk.

This cuts both ways. Taste governs the visible layer: what the user touches, how it feels, what delights. But it also governs the invisible layer: how the logic is structured, how decisions compound under load, what tradeoffs get locked into the foundation. AI will get better at implementation, but it won’t save you from bad taste embedded in the blueprint.

The Great Unbundling of Engineering

Programming today bundles two jobs: vision and compilation. You imagine what you want, then you painstakingly spell it out for the computer. As AI takes over the spelling, the imagination part becomes the entire game.

The best engineers will look less like human compilers and more like logic designers... people whose primary output is judgment.

This is why taste becomes the last mile of creativity. The bar for greatness is invisible until someone with taste sets it. That bar is not discoverable by brute force; it’s felt.

The Amplification Effect

The irony is that AI makes taste more powerful, not less. By stripping away the friction of execution, it amplifies the leverage of good judgment. The engineer with taste will move faster, explore further, and converge on better products because the bottleneck is no longer typing… It’s knowing.

And knowing can’t be automated.