Taste
Know good from good enough.
What It Is
The ability to judge quality — in ideas, execution, people, and strategy. When AI generates infinite options, the person who can say "this one" holds the leverage. Taste is pattern recognition applied to quality.
AI produces volume. Humans provide the filter. Taste can't be automated because it requires values — knowing not just what works, but what's worth doing. This is the curation capability: deciding what deserves attention, resources, and a place in the world.
Why It Matters
As AI makes production cheap, curation becomes the bottleneck. Anyone can generate a thousand options. Almost nobody can pick the right one.
| Without Taste | With Taste |
|---|---|
| Ship everything | Ship what matters |
| Default to more | Discipline to subtract |
| "It works" | "It's right" |
| Quantity as strategy | Quality as moat |
Core Patterns
- Subtraction — Good taste is knowing what to remove. The best work has nothing left to take away.
- Standards over opinions — "I don't like it" is preference. "It doesn't serve the goal" is taste.
- Reference library — Taste develops through exposure. Study the best across domains.
- Micro-judgment — The small decisions (word choice, spacing, timing) compound into the whole.
- Kill your darlings — The ability to cut what you love when it doesn't serve the work.
How to Develop
- Study what you admire — articulate specifically why it's good, not just that it is
- Curate deliberately — build collections of excellence in your domain
- Practice saying no — taste is mostly rejection
- Seek sharp critics — people who can name what's wrong teach taste faster than praise
- Ship and compare — put your work next to the best in the field. Notice the gap. Close it.
The Shadow
Paralysis. Never shipping because nothing meets your standard. Snobbery that mistakes exclusion for excellence. Taste without execution is just criticism.
Archetype Connection
Primary: Realist — judges against evidence, not feeling Secondary: Dreamer — knows what excellence looks like
Context
- Critical Thinking — Evaluating claims; taste evaluates quality
- Orchestration — Directing AI output requires taste to judge it
- Pattern Recognition — Taste is patterns applied to quality
- Positioning — Taste shapes what you're known for