{"slug": "taste-craft-or-something-more", "title": "Taste, Craft, or Something More?", "summary": "A developer argues that as AI makes production abundant, the bottleneck shifts from creation to judgment, making taste—the ability to discern what is worth producing—the new critical skill. Taste is not aura or charisma but the accumulation of thousands of small decisions repeated over years, and AI has exposed its value by making discernment expensive when creation is cheap.", "body_md": "The bottleneck has shifted.\n\nFor most of human history, the challenge was producing things.\n\nIf you wanted a painting, someone had to spend weeks painting it.\n\nIf you wanted software, someone had to spend months writing it.\n\nIf you wanted a song, an article, a logo, or a marketing campaign, somebody had to sit down and create it from scratch.\n\nThe people who could produce had an advantage.\n\nToday, production is becoming abundant.\n\nA logo can be generated in seconds.\n\nA landing page can appear before you've finished your coffee.\n\nA code scaffold can materialize from a prompt.\n\nAn article draft can be generated before you've finished thinking through the first paragraph.\n\nThe challenge is no longer producing.\n\nThe challenge is deciding what is worth producing.\n\nThe bottleneck has shifted.\n\nFrom creation to judgment.\n\nAnd that shift has made one word suddenly relevant again: **Taste.**\n\nIt feels like everyone is talking about taste.\n\nDesigners are talking about it.\n\nWriters are talking about it.\n\nFounders are talking about it.\n\nEngineers are talking about it.\n\nNot because taste suddenly became important.\n\nBut because AI has exposed how valuable it has always been.\n\nWhen creation becomes cheap, discernment becomes expensive.\n\nAnyone can generate ten options.\n\nNot everyone can recognize the one worth pursuing.\n\nWhen I started my career, there were people I looked up to.\n\nFounders.\n\nSenior engineers.\n\nPeople who seemed a few steps ahead of everyone else.\n\nI noticed the things around them.\n\nThe way they dressed.\n\nThe books they recommended.\n\nThe technology products they gravitated towards.\n\nThe niche hobbies they seemed to collect along the way.\n\nThe founder who always seemed to know about a product before everyone else.\n\nThe engineer whose workspace felt intentional rather than accidental.\n\nThe person who somehow always knew what was worth paying attention to.\n\nAt the time, I would have said this person had aura.\n\nAnd honestly, I think a lot of us do this.\n\nWe encounter someone whose choices seem unusually deliberate, and we call it confidence, charisma or aura.\n\nWhatever word we choose, we're trying to describe the same thing.\n\nA way of moving through the world that feels intentional.\n\nI wanted that too.\n\nSo I decided to do what most people do.\n\nI copied it.\n\nThe clothes.\n\nThe tools.\n\nThe habits.\n\nThe products.\n\nThe aesthetics.\n\nIf someone I admired used it, I wanted to try it.\n\nThere was even a period where I started wearing native more often after reading * Making It Big* by Femi Otedola.\n\nIn my head, I wasn't copying the clothes.\n\nI was trying to borrow whatever it was that made successful people feel successful.\n\nSome of those choices stayed.\n\nMany didn't.\n\nAnd that was the first clue.\n\nBecause if the clothes were the answer, they should have worked.\n\nIf the products were the answer, they should have worked.\n\nIf the aesthetics were the answer, they should have worked.\n\nBut they weren't.\n\nLike my sister would say:\n\n\"You can't teach anyone aura.\"\n\nThe older I get, the more I think she's right.\n\nNot because aura is some mystical thing people are born with.\n\nBut because what we often call taste is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions.\n\nDecisions about what to keep.\n\nWhat to discard.\n\nWhat to admire.\n\nWhat to ignore.\n\nDecisions repeated over years until they become instinct.\n\nWhat I began to understand was that what I was observing wasn't aura.\n\nIt was taste.\n\nThe clothes weren't the taste.\n\nThe books weren't the taste.\n\nThe furniture wasn't the taste.\n\nThe native wear wasn't the taste.\n\nThose things were merely evidence that taste had been there.\n\nTaste was the thing underneath.\n\nThe judgment behind the choices.\n\nThe accumulated experiences.\n\nThe comparisons.\n\nThe preferences.\n\nThe countless moments of deciding:\n\n\"This resonates with me.\"\n\n\"This doesn't.\"\n\nOver time, those decisions compound into something that looks effortless from the outside.\n\nWhen we talk about taste, I think we're often talking about two different things.\n\n**Personal Taste** and **Tastefulness**.\n\nThe two overlap.\n\nBut they are not the same thing.\n\nPersonal taste answers a simple question:\n\n**What feels like me?**\n\nIt develops through exposure.\n\nThrough curiosity.\n\nThrough experimentation.\n\nThrough trying things and discovering what resonates.\n\nMy first job exposed me to unfamiliar culture, art, systems, and technology products that I could compare against what I'd known before.\n\nSome of those choices stayed with me.\n\nOthers disappeared as quickly as they arrived.\n\nSlowly, a filter began to emerge.\n\nI became better at recognizing what felt aligned with who I was becoming and what wasn't.\n\nThat's personal taste.\n\nAnd over time, it becomes a surprisingly powerful tool.\n\nBecause when there are thousands of options available, a strong sense of self becomes a filter.\n\n\"What isn't me\" gets discarded almost immediately.\n\nWhat's left deserves closer attention.\n\nTastefulness answers a different question:\n\n**What is considered excellent within a craft?**\n\nGood taste looks different depending on where you are.\n\nIn architecture, it might be proportion and balance.\n\nIn music, it might be restraint.\n\nIn writing, it might be clarity.\n\nIn engineering, it might be simplicity.\n\nA preference for solutions that are elegant rather than complicated.\n\nSystems that are understandable rather than clever.\n\nInterfaces that feel obvious rather than impressive.\n\nThis kind of taste isn't purely personal.\n\nIt's shaped by communities.\n\nDisciplines.\n\nStandards.\n\nYears of accumulated knowledge.\n\nWhen people talk about cultivating taste, they're often talking about discernment.\n\nTaste sounds artistic.\n\nDiscernment sounds practical.\n\nBut I suspect they're describing the same thing.\n\nThe ability to separate signal from noise.\n\nThe timeless from the trendy.\n\nThe elegant from the complicated.\n\nThe useful from the merely impressive.\n\nEvery field has its own version of this.\n\nThe names change.\n\nThe underlying skill doesn't.\n\nOne place I've seen this most clearly is in engineering.\n\nA junior engineer often asks:\n\n\"Can we build this?\"\n\nAn engineer with developed taste asks:\n\n\"Should we build this?\"\n\n\"Why are we building this?\"\n\nThe technical challenge is rarely the hardest part.\n\nThe harder challenge is identifying which problems deserve solving in the first place.\n\nGood engineering taste might look like:\n\nChoosing simplicity over cleverness.\n\nWriting code that others can understand.\n\nRecognizing when abstraction helps.\n\nRecognizing when abstraction hurts.\n\nUnderstanding that sometimes the best feature is the one you never build.\n\nThe code is visible.\n\nThe judgment behind it is not.\n\nAI can generate options.\n\nThousands of them.\n\nIt can propose designs.\n\nWrite articles.\n\nGenerate code.\n\nCreate images.\n\nSuggest strategies.\n\nWhat it cannot do is decide which option matters.\n\nWhich reflects your values.\n\nWhich serves your audience.\n\nWhich aligns with the person you're trying to become.\n\nThose are judgment problems.\n\nAnd judgment comes from experience.\n\nFrom exposure.\n\nFrom comparison.\n\nFrom reflection.\n\nIn other words:\n\nTaste.\n\nThe more abundant creation becomes, the more valuable discernment becomes.\n\nThe encouraging thing is that taste isn't some mysterious gift bestowed upon a lucky few.\n\nIt can be developed.\n\nLike any other skill.\n\nConsume great work.\n\nStudy people operating at a high level and ask why their work resonates.\n\nDissect decisions.\n\nEvery great product contains a trail of trade-offs. Follow them.\n\nLeave your lane.\n\nEngineers should study architecture.\n\nWriters should study product design.\n\nDesigners should study music.\n\nTaste compounds when ideas cross disciplines.\n\nMost importantly, build things.\n\nNothing sharpens judgment like wrestling with constraints yourself.\n\nYou begin to understand why good work is difficult.\n\nAnd why truly great work is rare.\n\nFor a long time, skill meant being able to create.\n\nIncreasingly, skill may mean being able to choose.\n\nNot every possibility deserves pursuit.\n\nNot every option deserves attention.\n\nNot every generated output deserves existence.\n\nProduction is becoming abundant.\n\nJudgment remains scarce.\n\nAnd in a world overflowing with possibilities, the ability to recognize what is worth keeping may become one of the most valuable skills of all.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/taste-craft-or-something-more", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/tijan_io/taste-craft-or-something-more-21p3", "published_at": "2026-06-18 16:13:11+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-18 16:29:43.302766+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-products", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Femi Otedola"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/taste-craft-or-something-more", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/taste-craft-or-something-more.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/taste-craft-or-something-more.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/taste-craft-or-something-more.jsonld"}}