There’s a particular, peculiar feeling right now. Like standing at the edge of something, looking out at a landscape that’s shifting faster than you can map it. The tools are changing, the rules are changing. What was a skill yesterday is automated today.
And somewhere in the fog, a question: what’s left that’s actually yours?
I think discernment and taste are part of the answer. This is an attempt to figure out just how much.
Why did Apple beat Microsoft?
Steve Jobs had an answer. In a 1996 interview, he put it simply: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." Not that they lacked talent or resources, they actually had more of both. What they lacked was the ability to make connections across disciplines. To know what to leave out. To understand that design wasn't decoration but for a large part decision-making.
Thirty years later, the same argument is playing out at a much larger scale.
When OpenAI’s cofounder posts that taste is ‘a new core skill’, and tech companies start desperately hiring storytellers, something has shifted.
Here is what I think is happening…
Machines can generate anything now. Images, text, video, code - all at near-zero cost, in near-zero time. Creation is no longer the bottleneck.
So what is?
Judgment is. A point of view, discernment, the ability to look at hundreds of options and knowing which one matters. The ability to understand why something works, not just recognise that it does.
That’s taste. And it can’t be automated - not yet, possibly not ever. Because taste requires something AI structurally lacks: a point of view built from lived experience, accumulated knowledge, pain, and the slow work of paying attention over time.
You can’t download or shortcut it. It accumulates.
Taste in Context
But taste is slippier than most people admit - or at least most people in silicon valley.
A lot of what gets called taste is actually preference. Some like Bauhaus, well I really don’t. Both are valid; it’s personal and not the same thing.
Discernment on the other hand is different. Discernment is understanding why Bauhaus works - and when it doesn’t. It’s knowing that Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s minimalism wasn’t necessarily inherently tasteful - it was contextual. The same look on a different person, in a different setting, may read forgettable. On her, in that world it became iconic. Context made it taste. The object alone rarely ever does.
Virgil Abloh understood this completely. He had a way of explaining it: take a candle that looks like a can, put it in a white gallery space, it looks like art. Put the same candle in a garage, it looks like trash to be taken out. The object didn’t change; the room it sits in did. That is also a component of taste.
Taste is reading the room correctly and then making decisions that only work because you read it right.
This is what most discussions miss. Taste isn’t just about the object, the thing, the style, the trend. It’s as much about the relationship between it and everything around it. Get the context wrong, and the ‘tasteful’ choice becomes the wrong one.
Taste can also be deeply technical - not just aesthetic.
There’s taste in usage, in how something feels when you interact with it. There’s taste in convenience - knowing what to simplify and what to leave alone. Jobs understood this - Apple didn’t just look better, it felt better. That feeling was taste applied to experience, to interface, to the thousand decisions made to deliver a final product.
The Chief Taste Officer
This is why taste as a concept is exploding right now. When AI handles execution, the human who defines what’s worth executing and how becomes essential.
Of course, there are critics to this entire conversation. The moment silicon valley starts using the word ‘taste’, a certain crowd rolls their eyes a la ‘the more you use the word, the less you have it’, etc. And fair enough - there’s something absurd about tech bros discovering what artists, designers, and editors seem to have known forever. The word is being thrown around by people who couldn’t pick a good font if their Series B depended on it.
But dismissing the conversation entirely misses what’s shifting; the fact that these people are now asking these questions tells you something.
As for this publication - yes, the name might be presumptuous. It might even be cringe. But in the world we’re heading into, I foresee that CTO might stand for Chief Taste Officer and the technology officer might become a concept of the past.
Introducing ‘The Taste File’
So what is this series about?
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to build a framework around something most people assume is either genetic or unteachable.
I may not have all the answers, but I’ve spent years studying why some designs work and others don’t, why certain rooms feel right, why certain style choices stick and others fade. Being an observer from a young age has provided me with this lens.
Topics will include: whether taste can actually be learned, the art of rejection, building a reference library, how context shapes everything, observer vs. maker, taste in practice, and what happens when taste becomes professionalized.
The objective isn’t to hand out hard and fast rules but rather to build vocabulary around something abstract. A way of seeing that can be trained and sharpened over time. A survival skill for the age of AGI, perhaps.
Preference is personal. Discernment is a skill. This series is about the skill.
Taste takes time to cultivate. You're providing the shortcut. Thanks for a great read. 🐾