Here's a prediction: within a few years, the ability to build software will be nearly universal. AI tools will keep improving. The barrier to making things will approach zero. Anyone with an idea will be able to ship a product, a website, an app, a tool. The playing field will be level in a way it has never been before.
And when that happens, the only thing left that separates the remarkable from the forgettable will be taste.
Taste isn't what you think it's
Most people hear "taste" and think of something subjective, something fluffy. A preference for one colour over another. Liking mid-century furniture or not. That's aesthetic preference, and it's the least interesting part of taste.
Real taste is pattern recognition. It's the ability to look at a thousand inputs - designs, products, experiences, cultural signals - and understand instinctively which ones work and why. It's knowing that something is off before you can articulate what. It's the accumulated result of years of paying attention.
I've spent my career in advertising, where taste - though people rarely call it that - is the difference between work that lands and work that doesn't. The best strategists I've worked with all had it. They could feel when a brief was wrong, sense when a campaign was going to connect, instinctively understand the difference between something that was merely competent and something that was genuinely good.
That skill doesn't go away when you switch from making campaigns to making products. If anything, it becomes more important.
The "just ship it" problem
There's a mantra in the startup world that I both agree and disagree with: just ship it. Get it out there. Don't overthink. Iterate in public.
I agree with the spirit. Speed matters. Perfection is the enemy of progress. I've shipped things that weren't finished and they were better for it, because real-world feedback taught me things I could never have figured out in my head.
But "just ship it" without taste produces noise. It produces the twentieth identical AI wrapper, the hundredth to-do app, the thousandth newsletter tool. It produces things that work but don't matter. Things nobody remembers or returns to.
Taste is what turns "shipped" into "special." It's the filter that helps you decide not just what to build, but what not to build. Not just how something works, but how it feels. Not just whether it solves a problem, but whether it solves it in a way that respects the person using it.
Where taste comes from
You can't learn taste from a course. It isn't a framework or a methodology. It comes from immersion. From consuming widely and deeply. From paying attention to what works and building a mental library of references.
My taste was shaped by print magazines - The Face, i-D, Dazed - long before I worked in advertising. It was shaped by spending hours in record shops, by the way a good album cover could tell you everything about the music inside before you heard a single note. It was shaped by the early internet, by Tumblr and the blogosphere, by the era when curation was a cultural force.
Every project I've built carries those influences, even when they aren't visible. Modern Retro is explicitly about visual taste - it reimagines brands through a very specific aesthetic lens. But even something as functional as a pub guide or a kid's activity directory has taste baked into it. In the colour choices. The typography. The way information is structured. The things I chose to include and, more importantly, the things I chose to leave out.
Taste as competitive advantage
In a world where building is easy, taste becomes a moat. Not a permanent one - nothing is permanent - but a meaningful one. Because taste is slow to develop and impossible to fake. You can copy someone's colour palette. You can't copy their instinct for what feels right.
This is why I believe the next wave of genuinely interesting products won't come from engineers working backwards from technology. They'll come from people who understand audiences, who have cultural fluency, who have spent years developing a sense for what resonates and why. People from advertising, design, media, fashion, music - creative industries where taste is the currency.
These people have always had ideas. They've always had the conviction. What they've not had is the ability to build. That is changing. And the results will be unmistakable - not because the code is better, but because the decisions behind the code are better.
The taste test
If you want to know whether something was built with taste, there's a simple test. Look at the details that didn't need to be there. The animation that nobody asked for. The colour that's slightly warmer than the obvious choice. The feature that was left out because it would have cluttered the experience. The name that means something.
These aren't accidents. They're choices. And they're the kind of choices that only come from someone who cares about the work beyond whether it functions correctly.
Taste isn't a luxury. It isn't a nice-to-have. In the age of AI, it's the last unfair advantage. And unlike technical skill, it can't be automated.
