When Everyone Can Make, Taste Is All That's Left

Something fundamental has shifted in the past two years, and most people haven't caught up yet. The tools of creation — the ones that used to cost thousands of pounds and require years of training — are now available to anyone with a laptop and an idea. You can generate photorealistic images with Midjourney. You can build a full product with Claude Code. You can write, design, compose, animate, and ship without ever having studied how any of it works. The barrier to making things has not just been lowered. It has been removed entirely.

This changes everything. And the thing it changes most is where value lives.

For decades, the creative economy ran on a simple scarcity model: making things was hard, so the people who could make things were valuable. Graphic designers were valuable because most people couldn't use Photoshop. Developers were valuable because most people couldn't write code. Filmmakers were valuable because equipment was expensive and editing was a craft. The skill was in the execution. If you could take what was in someone's head and turn it into something real, you had leverage.

That scarcity is gone. AI tools have done to creative production what the printing press did to scribes — not eliminated the work entirely, but made the old bottleneck irrelevant. The new bottleneck is not "can you make it?" It is "should you make it?"

The abundance problem

When everyone can make everything, everything gets made. This is already happening. Look at any AI image platform and you will find millions of generations per day. Look at the app stores — more tools, more products, more "solutions" than any human could evaluate in a lifetime. Look at social media: more content, more posts, more noise than has ever existed in human history.

Abundance sounds like a good thing until you are drowning in it. The internet was supposed to democratise information, and it did — but it also created a world where the most valuable skill is not finding information but filtering it. The same thing is now happening with creation itself. When the supply of things made is infinite, the value shifts entirely to selection.

This is where taste enters the picture.

What taste actually is

Taste is the most misunderstood word in business. People hear "taste" and think of luxury brands, wine connoisseurs, or design snobs arguing about kerning. That is not what I am talking about. Taste, in the sense that matters for the future of creative work, is something much more practical and much more powerful.

Taste is pattern recognition applied to quality. It is the ability to look at a hundred options and know — almost instantly, almost instinctively — which one works and which ones don't. It is knowing when something is not quite right before you can articulate why. It is the judgment call that separates "technically functional" from "genuinely good."

You know the feeling. You visit two websites that do roughly the same thing, and one of them just feels right. The spacing, the language, the way it anticipates what you need. The other one technically works but feels slightly off. Both were made competently. The difference is taste.

Here is the critical point: AI can execute. AI cannot taste. Give ten people the same AI tool with the same prompt and you will get ten different outputs, because each person brings a different set of references, instincts, and judgments to the process. The tool is constant. The taste is variable. And the taste is where all the value lives.

Same tool, different taste

I have seen this firsthand. I have used Claude Code to build eighteen products without writing a single line of code. Every one of those products used the same underlying technology. Every one of them was made by the same person with the same toolchain. And every one of them looks, feels, and works differently — because the decisions I made about what to build, how it should look, what to include and what to leave out were all taste decisions.

The tool did the making. I did the choosing.

This is the new creative model. The human is not the maker. The human is the editor, the curator, the director. The person who decides what is worth making and what is not. The person who can look at an AI-generated output and know whether it is 60% of the way there or 95% of the way there. The person who can articulate the difference between "good enough" and "actually good."

A developer can take any AI code assistant and build a functional product. A person with taste can take the same tool and build a product that people actually want to use. Those are two very different things, and the gap between them is going to be the defining competitive advantage of the next decade.

The taste gap is widening

Here is the thing that most people miss about the AI revolution: it does not level the playing field. It tilts it — dramatically — in favour of people with taste.

Before AI tools, a person with great taste but no technical skills was stuck. They could see what was good, they could articulate what needed to be different, but they couldn't make it themselves. They were dependent on finding the right collaborators, the right budget, the right circumstances to bring their vision to life. The taste was there but the means of production were not.

AI tools remove that constraint entirely. For the first time in history, taste can be expressed directly, without the mediation of technical skill. A strategist can build a product. A designer can ship a full application. A writer can create an interactive experience. The people who always knew what was good can now make what is good.

Meanwhile, people without taste — people who relied on technical skill alone — are finding that their moat has evaporated. Being able to code is less valuable when Claude can code. Being able to design is less valuable when Midjourney can design. The skill that remains scarce is the judgment about what to code, what to design, what to ship.

Taste is not just aesthetics

I want to be clear about something: taste is not just about making things look nice. That is a common misunderstanding and a limiting one. Taste applies to every decision in the creation process.

It is taste that tells you a product needs three features, not thirty. It is taste that tells you the landing page should have one clear message, not a carousel of five. It is taste that tells you the brand name should be one word, not a compound phrase. It is taste that tells you the newsletter should go out weekly, not daily. It is taste that tells you the colour palette should be warm and bold, not cool and muted.

Taste is judgment applied at every scale — from the strategic (what should this product be?) to the granular (what should this button say?). And the people who have it will outperform the people who don't, by a margin that grows wider every time the tools get better.

The uncomfortable conclusion

If taste is the last competitive advantage, then the uncomfortable truth is that it cannot be taught like a technical skill. You can learn to code. You can learn to use Figma. You can learn prompt engineering in a weekend. But taste is accumulated over years of looking, reading, experiencing, and — critically — forming opinions about what is good and what is not.

Taste is the sum of everything you have ever consumed, curated, and cared about. It is shaped by the magazines you read as a teenager, the films you rewatched, the shops you walked into and immediately felt something. It is the product of a lifetime of paying attention.

This is why I believe the future belongs to a new category of creative professional — people who may never write a line of code, but who have spent their entire careers building the one thing that matters most in an age of infinite production: the ability to know what is worth making.

The machines can make anything. The question is whether you can tell them what is worth making.

That is taste. And that is all that is left.