A publication about what happens when AI meets taste. Written by a strategy director who builds products without code.
AI tools have democratised creation. The bottleneck has shifted from "can you make it?" to "should you make it?" Taste is now the last competitive advantage — the one thing machines cannot generate.
"Give ten people the same AI tool with the same prompt and you will get ten different outputs. The tool is constant. The taste is variable. And the taste is where all the value lives."
Read essayAI has democratised creation. The bottleneck shifts from execution to judgment. Taste becomes the last unfair advantage.
We are not pretending to be developers. We are a new category of maker. 18 products, zero lines of code, all taste.
When content is infinite, selection becomes the art. From DJs to museum curators to AI prompters — the through-line.
Strategy is undervalued because everyone thinks they can do it. AI raises the floor but does not raise the ceiling.
Not a tutorial. A philosophy. Your tools are a statement about what you value. Here is the stack behind 18 products.
The challenge of quantifying taste. Why the best framework is one that makes you argue with it.
The T-shaped person is dead. The future belongs to paint-splatter shaped people who refuse to be boxed into a single lane.
The volume trap is killing brands. Curation — knowing what NOT to publish — is the real editorial skill.
One person with AI tools can now do what a 200-person agency used to do. The economics have changed forever.
Bourdieu for the algorithm age. Why cultural capital compounds over time while marketing spend does not.
Watchers see what doers miss. Observation is the most undervalued competitive advantage in professional life.
A strategy director who had never written code built 18 products with AI. The meta-essay about the journey.
AI can generate anything. So the question shifts from "can we make this?" to "should we make this?" The companies that embed taste into their AI workflows will win.
When everything is available, selection becomes the value. Creation is commodified. The future belongs to curators, editors, and tastemakers.
AI can score, rank, and categorise. But it cannot feel the rightness of a choice. This is why human tastemakers become more valuable as AI scales.
Taste Machines is a publication about what happens when AI meets taste. It explores the shift from a world where making was the bottleneck to one where judgment is the bottleneck — and what that means for creative work, brand strategy, and who gets to build.
Written by Mike Litman, a strategy director who has spent 14 years in advertising and recently built 18 products without writing code. Not as a stunt — as proof that taste, strategy, and editorial judgment are the skills that matter most when AI handles the execution.