taste is not a vibe

i used to think taste was the thing you had or you didn’t. like an aesthetic instinct — you could spot it in someone’s work but you couldn’t really explain how it got there.

i don’t think that anymore.

taste is a compressed record of decisions. every time you looked at something and thought “that’s not quite right” and then worked out why — that’s a deposit. every time you had to explain to someone what wasn’t working, and they pushed back, and you had to get more specific — that’s another one. do that enough times and you build something internal. a calibration. a standard that runs faster than conscious thought.

it shows up as instinct but it was built by reps.

the reason i’m thinking about this is AI. because the thing AI is genuinely good at is producing output that looks finished. the spacing is reasonable. the copy is grammatically correct. the layout follows conventions. it’s confident output. and if your internal standard isn’t strong enough to catch “this is fine but it’s not right,” you’ll ship it.

that’s the invisible risk. not that AI makes bad things. it’s that it makes okay things very quickly, and okay things are much harder to argue against than obviously wrong things.

i’ve been watching this play out with my team. the designers who are doing well with AI are the ones who already had strong opinions about what good looks like — and who trust those opinions even when they can’t immediately articulate them. they use AI to move faster toward something they’ve already imagined. the designers who are struggling are the ones who were still building that internal standard. AI gives them a starting point, but they don’t have enough calibration yet to know where to go from there.

the problem is: the reps that used to build taste are exactly the reps AI is now doing for you.

i haven’t figured out what replaces them. i’m guessing it’s more critique, more explicit narration of reasoning, more time spent on the question of why this feels right rather than just accepting that it does. but that’s a slower way to build calibration, and it requires a level of deliberate attention that’s hard to sustain.

what i feel sure about: taste is not a vibe. it’s not something you either have or you don’t. it’s trained, and the training is effortful, and skipping it shows up later in ways that are hard to name but obvious to anyone whose standard is high enough to see them.

the good news is that means it can be built intentionally. the bad news is that means you actually have to do that.

building taste requires honest feedback on the work you’re actually making. i offer structured design critique — diagnostic, not decorative. $75.