taste.md

the new tech buzzword

Everyone in tech is suddenly talking about “taste.”

Paul Graham tweeted it’s the big differentiator in the AI age. Sam Altman said OpenAI hires for it. The Rick Rubin clip is everywhere… mostly when describing what vibecoding feels like.

And I'm sitting here like... sure, some companies invested in design, the one discipline in tech that was actually about this stuff. But most teams still run one designer for every fifteen engineers. Some have more PMs than designers. "Design-driven" was the buzzword a few years ago.

Now they've swapped in "taste." Funny how the word changed but the ratios didn't. In fact… PM hiring is up 20% this year while designer openings have been flat since 2023.

I get why taste is popular. AI can build almost anything now, so the question shifts from “can we build it” to “should we build it” and “does it feel right.” But the buzzword has annoyed me enough to actually ask my self… “ok Pablo, what IS taste”...

Honestly... I don’t think I’d even use that word anymore. What I’d describe is something more like... intentionality. The act of choosing. Looking at something and going “no, not that” over and over until what’s left actually means something.

It’s not about having good opinions. It’s more like... you care enough to keep editing. To remove. To say no to the thing that technically works but doesn’t feel right. Most people stop at “good enough.” The ones with whatever-we’re-calling-this keep going.

So when tech people say “taste is the moat”... I think what they’re actually noticing is that AI defaults to the average. It converges on the most expected answer. The most popular template, theme, tech, infra, font. And that produces stuff that’s... fine. Technically fine. But it doesn’t feel like anything new.

What stands out now isn’t quality since AI has raised the floor on it. It’s whether you can feel a person behind it. Warmth. Boldness. Weird decisions that only make sense because someone with a specific life made them. AI needs a human going “no, not that, try this instead.” Someone steering it away from the default.

We saw this at Lummi. When we started in 2023, we were generating a massive amount of AI images. And we quickly realized that for the collection to be worth anything, someone had to pick. A human, sitting there, deciding... this is good, this is not good. We wanted people to hit Lummi’s grid and feel inspired, like any image could be an excuse to start a project.

When younger people took over our curation, the whole collection shifted. It felt different. Not worse, just... different. The person deciding had a different life. Different references. The collection was a fingerprint of whoever was choosing. Shaped by who you are right now.

We’ve been doing the same thing at v0 recently. Reviewing what we’ve made, cutting features, stripping UI, removing anything that doesn’t need to be there. The tool can generate a lot. The job is knowing what to take away.

Designers should be paying attention. Not to the word, but to what’s underneath it. This is what we’ve been training for. Everyone else is just now showing up.

The risk is letting people who just learned the word last Tuesday take over the conversation. People who think “taste” means picking between three AI-generated options and going with the one that looks most like a competitor. That’s the opposite of it.

Maybe what we need isn’t a definition. Maybe it’s just a rule. Like a taste.md skill file you’d put in your mind. And all it says is: “go beyond purple gradients and make a decision.”

A real one. Not the safe one, not the default one, not the one the model would pick. Yours.