Taste Is All That's Left

The advent of AI has dramatically reduced the effort required to create software, transforming the traditional challenges of production into a nearly frictionless process. This shift, while seemingly progressive, fundamentally redefines the nature of skill and value in engineering, pushing 'taste' to the forefront as the critical, distinguishing factor. * Historically, the difficulty lay in simply making things exist, but AI now rapidly generates plausible artifacts, collapsing the 'idea-to-artifact' distance and removing the production wall. * While 'good enough' AI output is abundant, it dissolves the incentive for excellence; the economic 'filter' that once rationed output is gone, replaced by an endless flood of 'fine' but often indifferent creations. * In this new landscape, 'taste' emerges as paramount: an intuitive, wordless judgment that separates 'fine' from 'right.' * Taste isn't inherent; it's honed through repeated mistakes and the friction of past efforts, a learning process bypassed by frictionless generation, creating producers who lack judgment on what should be made. * Possessing taste means refusing 'fine' for 'right,' a slow, unrewarded process that doesn't align with market incentives or show up in metrics, making it an uncredited burden. * With infinite, free noise, the act of choosing and curating what deserves to exist becomes the ultimate skill, mirroring historical shifts where abundant production moved the focus from creation to discernment. * The tools have stripped away everything but judgment; taste, being unmeasurable, unautomatable, and slow, becomes the ultimate evidence of human care and intentionality in a hyper-efficient, AI-driven world. The author concludes that while everyone can now make anything, almost no one can tell you what is truly worth making, establishing 'taste' as the only scarce and truly human skill left in an era of abundant, frictionless creation.